자연의 영성

The Spirituality of Nature: Emily Dickinson’s and Mary Oliver’s Nature Poetry

This essay examines the spirituality of nature evidenced in the poetry ofEmily Dickinson and Mary Oliver by comparing the nature poems of bothpoets in terms of how they envision kinship to nature and coexistence withnature. The poems’ nature spirituality reflects a complex ecologicalconsciousness based on the balancing of kinship with and alienation fromnature. On the one hand, nature and human beings are depicted as livingharmoniously, as fellows, brothers, and sisters. Thereby, both poets’ worksresonate deeply with the spirit of St. Francis of Assisi. On the other hand,Dickinson and Oliver recognize a gap between the human and nonhuman. Intheir works, both poets personify nature to bridge the gap between the twoentities. In this sense, both poets’ nature spirituality is related to what Brysoncalls “the place-spaciousness of nature,” an intermingling of “a sense of place(domesticity)” and “a sense of space(wildness)” espoused by Yi-Fu Tuan. Dickinson wrote poems about her “fellow” snakes in which she revealsfamiliarity with and alienation from them, echoing the Tuanian concepts ofplace and space. Although she often displays a greater familiarity with her“brother” snakes than does Dickinson, Oliver sometimes inadvertently disclosesher uneasiness with them. Like Dickinson’s poems, Oliver’s snake poems revealnature spirituality through the paradoxical experience of connection andseparation. Both poets’ awareness of nature’s otherness as well as its kinshipcreates a dynamic tension in their poems, which challenges the reader to forgea reconciliation in the act of reading.