Relationship Between Literature And Environment Poem by Bijay Kant Dubey

Environment and literature which forms a major part, a major crux of ecocriticism, ecocritical studies tells of our approach, our attitude, the way we take to, enter into taking into consideration, the present state of things, when we are ridden, confronted with environmental concerns and seem to be grappling with seriously as no literature can be literature if the existential matters are not addressed, averted and avoided and so the thematic of it bringing to our fore, to our notice the concern, the angst and bewilderment of the age.

How to get rid of environmental anxiety, climate change, global warming, acid rain to patter, atomic summer to take a drastic toll with radio-active radiation, how to fight them back, ho to set the clock of the earth right, how to feel the pulse? We are really disturbed, something gnaws us internally.

In the past we used to recreate the rural scenes and images, the pastoral and the idyllic used to engage our minds, but bordering upon the classical and our stories used to be of the battles fought and lost, palaces and royal lineage. If we go through the literature of Lawrence and Hardy, Spenser and Shakespeare, we shall come to note that they too relate to what they have seen around them and the writers can be no exception to that. How Shakespeare's Tempest, Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge and Lawrence's Nottinghamshire? Where Caliban, Ariel, where Prospero?

The romantics were but the lovers of man and nature and they loved to derive and draw from simple life and living, plain imagery negating artificial and ornamental imagery, the courtiers and cavaliers. The pre-romantics penetrated deep into the twilight falling, the transitional things opting for natural scenes and imagery with pensive reflection and brooding, taking to joy and pleasure, flowers and rural scapes. But the imagery worsened it during the war-time with the horror and terror of World Wars and the dropping of the atom bombs and we turned into war-mongers. Instead of the island imagery, the ships sailing drew our attention to, love for animals we loved to talk about sporadically demarcating the story of the islands dredged, land-filled. The poems of Hughes even though relate to a kill and violence, those from a hard heart are but marvels in bird imagery, animal imagery which we can feel while going through his poetry making us remember of Plath and his envy.

Even in the newspapers we hear about sometimes the bats dying in a great number, monkeys dying in a great number and man-animal conflicts as for the elephants straying into the human areas, knocked down by the speeding trains into the jungles, the wild cats being hunted, the white-breasted water birds, for the falling numbers of vultures, the house sparrows where have they flown away?