Though he was later criticized by the Christian church, Charles Darwin maintained a faith that evolved, much like his own theories, over the course of his life. In much of his writing, he wrote about the interplay between god and nature. Relaying a hike to a mountaintop in one of his memoirs, he wrote, “When we reached the crest and looked backwards, a glorious view was presented. The atmosphere resplendently clear; the sky an intense blue; the profound valleys; the wild broken forms: the heaps of ruins, piled up during the lapse of ages; the bright-coloured rocks, contrasted with the quiet mountains of snow, all these together produced a scene no one could have imagined. Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.”
It’s the third week of July and we’re hearing writing along the theme of nature this month. Today, Monroe Williams shares a poem by Alice Cary, called “To Solitude.” Along with her sister, Phoebe, Alice Cary published poems while still a teenager in the 1830’s. Their work gained a following from writers like Edgar Allen Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier, even before publishing their collection - Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary - in 1850.
Something I Heard is supported by Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
