Snowdrop By Langston Hughes

Using the views from the critical anthology and at least three poems by Hughes, explore and evaluate how the natural world is captured and used in the poems ‘Snowdrop’, ‘The Bull Moses’ and ‘The Bear’.

Hughes, unlike any other poet, manages to capture the natural world in a variety of different ways. Most significantly he captures the power and beauty of nature, but always portrays the subtle danger and death that is contained in the same world. Thoreau said ‘I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the wild’. Yet Hughes does, he ‘imagines what he is writing about. Sees it and lives it’.

In the poem ‘Snowdrop’ Hughes captures the decaying of nature of the ‘globe shrunk tight’ and ‘her pale head heavy

The negative continuations of the industrial world by Hughes presents images to the reader such as ‘the globe shrunk tight’, the ‘dulled wintering heart’ with her head as ‘heavy as metal’, which shows how the prevention of the animals including their natural instincts has led to the continuous growth of the cyclical structure of the decay, due to the globalization of the world limiting the impacts of nature and nature's growth and development it needs to survive. Hughes once said ‘I began to look at them, you see, from their own point of view’ and within this poem Hughes is encouraging the reader to look at nature from natures point of

This causes Hughes to combine ‘animal instinct and poetic imagination’ together allowing it to ‘all flow into one another with an exact sensuousness’ and giving parts over which he has control of, the words and rhythms and images, are alive. Hughes presents to the reader nature in the poems ‘The Bull Moses’, ‘Snowdrop’ and ‘The Bear’, yet manages to capture it in three completely different ways. In ‘The Bull Moses’, capture the power struggle and lack of appreciation for nature, in ‘Snowdrop’, he capture the beauty of death and decay, but the horrors that the modern world has on nature, and finally in ‘The Bear’, Hughes manages to capture the time constituted world of man and compare it to the freedom of nature. This depiction of nature in three different, yet critical of the same things, human beings and their destruction of nature, show to the readers that nature is more than something beautiful that we destroy, by using the natural world, Hughes allow the audience to know, however old they are, that the natural world is valuable and the ‘rediscovery and adaptation of these values is one of the keys to our collective future survival, let alone