Escargot and thoughts on poetry...

This morning I was rushing out the door--rushing for no reason in particular. I wasn't running late and there was nowhere I had to be immediately. Rushing off to get something done, feeling like I am not getting enough done--these are common feelings for me lots of the time. Now I am not complaining--I like my life that way. It helps me feel motivated and productive and (eventually) accomplished. But as I walked out the door today, a little creature was slowing creeping across my door mat.



It stopped me in my tracks for a bit, so much so that I even snapped the picture above. A snail really is an amazing creature, carrying around something as marvelous as a pretty shell. He or she was a pretty brave snail, too, not really hiding in the shell as I leaned over him/her to take a picture.

Can you see where I am going with this? (I hope it's not too cutesy or Chicken Soup for the Soul). Something as tiny as a snail made me stop, take a look, and consider the wonder of creation. It made me slow down, just for a moment, at a moment when I certainly benefited from slowing down.

The rest of the morning, as I thought about the snail, I thought about all the great poems written about little creatures who lead human beings to greater insights about themselves. Here's a partial list:

• John Donne's "The Flea". Donne ingeniously uses the logic in this poem, arguing that since the same flea on a woman he desires might have also fed on him, and since their bloods, therefore, were probably already mixed, they ought to just sleep together.
• Robert Burn's "To a Mouse." Burns is said to have written this poem after turning up a mouse nest on his farm. It contain the famous line "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley." For those unfamiliar with Burns' dialect, it's usually translated into "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry.'" He also has a poem called "To a Louse," slightly less scandalous than Donne's poem on vermin.
  
• Edward Taylor's "Upon a Wasp Chilled with Cold." Taylor's speaker observes a wasp that seems to come back to life and constructs an elaborate conceit in which a sinner is imagined as the wasp and God as the sun that brings him back to life. I'm partial to Taylor these days, as I taught some of his poems to get my job here at Shepherd. He really is an amazing person--a Puritan clergymen who wrote these elaborate and beautiful poems to get himself ready to preach. And most of the poems were forgotten until they were discovered in 1937, over 200 years after he died.
• Walt Whitman's "A Noiseless Patient Spider." This poem kills me--in a good way. The image of the spider/soul throwing out "filament, filament, filament" hoping for a connection is so beautiful and touching. But Whitman has a way of doing that with nature poems. Don't even get me started on "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking."
  

I could go on, I suppose (haven't even touched Emily Dickinson yet, or that wonderful bug that Thoreau talks about crawling out of the table in the end of Walden, although I suppose I'd be switching genres then), but you get my point--a point the metaphysical poets, the British Romantics and the American Transcendentalists (and poets, painters, and writers long before and after them) made so well: creation is a constant source of wonder and inspiration for us, a way to understand both ourselves and the world around us. Okay--enough English professor preaching!