5 Tips for Writing Nature Poems

While people and culture change over time, there are a few poetry topics that I think will always be incredibly popular with new and experienced poets: observation poems, confession poems, love poems (which are often themselves confession poems), and nature poems. 

Nature poems include those written about birds, trees, waterways, insects, flowers, gardens, dirt, the moon, and so much more. Chances are pretty good that if you’ve read or written much poetry, you’ve interacted with a nature poem and seen it up close in its natural habitat. 

That said, since nature poems are so ubiquitous in the world of poetry, they’re easy to write in a way that’s been done and re-done before. This isn’t a bad thing, but here are five tips for writing nature poems that have been effective for others. 

In Paul Muldoon’s “Wind and Tree,” the poet compares the ways of trees to the ways of humans by describing how trees congregate together and hold and break each other. Then he shares how he’d like to be a single tree, so that the poem moves from being just an observation of nature to an observation of human nature. Another great example of this can be found in Alberto Ríos’ “Twenty Minutes in the Backyard,” which turns a normal backyard into a bustling city of action. 

Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” does not happen without two things: woods and snow. But this nature poem, which also includes a lake, is not about the natural world; it’s about the poet having a moment of appreciation during his evening travels. Similarly, Louise Glück’s “The Pond” uses the pond as a setting for the poet to confess her thoughts to another.

Williams Carlos Williams’ long poem Paterson was written to follow the course of the Passaic River, which runs through Paterson, N.J. Williams compared the life of the river to his own, citing the river above the Paterson Great Falls, the river below the falls, and its eventual exit to the sea (or Newark Bay)—and he used more than 200 pages to write about it. Of course, Walt Whitman also used nature as a mega-sized metaphor in his Leaves of Grass collection, which includes poems focused on the various aspects of natural and human nature. 

While excess can be fun when writing nature poems, many poets find minimalism is preferable. Emily Dickinson wrote several nature poems—often in fewer than 10 lines—including “Who robbed the woods” and “My river runs to thee.” In fact, one of the most concise poetic forms is also a nature poem: the haiku! Many poets debate the number of lines and syllables (not everyone believes in 5-7-5), but every haiku poet agrees haiku should focus on a brief moment, provide a sense of enlightenment, and offer a cutting and season word. This brings us back to the old pond, Matsuo Bashō’s pond, which also features a frog and a sound (in a variety of translations). 

One more way to capture the majesty of nature in a poem is to fit it into a poetic form. The haiku is a good example, as well as the haibun. But other forms work as well, including Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s “Hummingbird Abecedarian,” which uses each letter of the alphabet in order to start each line, and Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina “A Miracle for Breakfast,” which uses among its six alternating end words “river” and “sun.” Even Frost’s poem mentioned above was written using interlocking rubaiyat as the form. 

For an incredible list of poetic forms to try, visit WritersDigest.com/write-better-poetry/list-of-50-poetic-forms-for-poets. 

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