Literature about working in nature

August 15, 2021 7:56 PM

I will soon be teaching Of Mice and Men to high school sophomores. (Not my pick, let’s not derail if possible.) I would like to supplement with poems, essays, short stories, or prose passages about people at work in nature (or at least the outdoors). Anything come to mind?

I think of the long ecstatic passage in Anna Karenina about scything, and Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking.” Some mix of the bucolic and the brutal nature of outdoor work. I’m open to all ideas. Thanks!

posted by argybarg to Writing & Language (23 answers total)

Wendell Berry! For poetry, essays and prose.
posted by pjsky at 8:14 PM on August 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

Ah, if only sophomores could rule the world!

I like Tennyson. Lady of Shalott.

Or Charge of the Light Brigade.

Tiger, tiger burning bright.

O Captain, my Captain!

Anything by Rudyard Kipling or Hemingway.
posted by Marie Mon Dieu at 8:21 PM on August 15, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hardy is terrific for this -- I've always especially loved the various descriptions of the dairy in Tess:

(here's something from chapter XVI)

Not quite sure of her direction, Tess stood still upon the hemmed expanse of verdant flatness, like a fly on a billiard-table of indefinite length, and of no more consequence to the surroundings than that fly. The sole effect of her presence upon the placid valley so far had been to excite the mind of a solitary heron, which, after descending to the ground not far from her path, stood with neck erect, looking at her.

Suddenly there arose from all parts of the lowland a prolonged and repeated call—“Waow! waow! waow!”

From the furthest east to the furthest west the cries spread as if by contagion, accompanied in some cases by the barking of a dog. It was not the expression of the valley’s consciousness that beautiful Tess had arrived, but the ordinary announcement of milking-time—half-past four o’clock, when the dairymen set about getting in the cows.

The red and white herd nearest at hand, which had been phlegmatically waiting for the call, now trooped towards the steading in the background, their great bags of milk swinging under them as they walked. Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton by the open gate through which they had entered before her. Long thatched sheds stretched round the enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid green moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion almost inconceivable in its profundity. Between the post were ranged the milchers, each exhibiting herself at the present moment to a whimsical eye in the rear as a circle on two stalks, down the centre of which a switch moved pendulum-wise; while the sun, lowering itself behind this patient row, threw their shadows accurately inwards upon the wall. Thus it threw shadows of these obscure and homely figures every evening with as much care over each contour as if it had been the profile of a court beauty on a palace wall; copied them as diligently as it had copied Olympian shapes on marble façades long ago, or the outline of Alexander, Caesar, and the Pharaohs.

posted by mochapickle at 8:24 PM on August 15, 2021 [6 favorites]

Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude comes to mind.
posted by childofTethys at 8:37 PM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

Benjamin Rosenbaum, "The Orange": flash fiction / microfiction that might go over well with high school students, it's a little bit to do with the orange's place in a commodity chain, including a line or two about migrant labor

Grace Stone Coates, "Wild Plums": this is more to do with picking plums as a leisure activity, enjoying nature and seeing how different two families can be, but it's a pretty well-known story and set at least out in the country

Robinson Jeffers, "The Purse-Seine": though it's to do with harvesting sardines, this is definitely a poem about working in nature that's got a grim edge to it and might pair well with Steinbeck (published the same year too, by coincidence)
posted by Wobbuffet at 10:14 PM on August 15, 2021 [3 favorites]

for fun:

To Whom it May Concern
BY ANDREA COHEN

Soon I’ll move to Norway.
If that’s a bitter pill,

well, swill, swallow. I’m going,
and I won’t wallow, not in Norway,

where they’re so beyond
slave labor, with laws that say

a clerk must work within five
meters of a window through

which she can see a tree
and by that tree be seen.

My mind’s made up.
I will be Norwegian with Norwegian

trees. I’ll be seer and be seen.
It’s a scenic scene, it’s

how it goes, I’m going.
Tell the top brass, if

they ask, I don’t give
a damn about their asses.

But I will miss the beeches and the ashes.
It’s not their fault I’m leaving.

They’re only trees, and
leaving, I’m Norwegian.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 10:23 PM on August 15, 2021 [5 favorites]

The opening scene in John Berger's A Fortunate Man [full text available but the photos by John Mohr add much] has the doctor restoring a crushed wood-cutter to a working life.
Mending Wall by Robert Frost. Any chance of getting the youngsters out to build a dry-stone wall?!
Digging by Seamus Heaney
posted by BobTheScientist at 12:25 AM on August 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Studs Terkel. His body of work is huge, and I'm not familiar enough with it to point to a partic6place. I'd start with his book Working which has vignettes of farm workers among others.
posted by SemiSalt at 4:38 AM on August 16, 2021 [5 favorites]

You could probably find some good passages in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.
posted by Redstart at 4:56 AM on August 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Ghosts of War in a Wisconsin Forest
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 5:56 AM on August 16, 2021

It can be cheesy and sometimes racist (though less so you might expect), but Robert William Service's poetry is interesting and worth discussing. Anything from Ballads of a Cheekacho or Rhymes of a Sourdough would fit.
posted by eotvos at 5:57 AM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

Sorry if this is glaringly obvious, but the Burns poem that the title "Of Mice and Men" is taken from is about ploughing. Here's a modern English translation.
posted by FencingGal at 6:14 AM on August 16, 2021

Another random idea: selected passages from Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle.
posted by eotvos at 6:27 AM on August 16, 2021

Sigurd Olson wrote (in early 20th C.) about being in nature, and at least one of his books is about canoeing trips into far north Canada.

He even writes about the isolated communities there (centered on a gold mine or uranium mine or something?). I can search the text for the specific selection, but if you want to read someone waxing positive about "man in the natural world," Olson is as quotable as Aldo Leopold and he gets off his butt and puts himself among the lakes and pines. I mean, here's just one Olson line:

“I have discovered in a lifetime of traveling in primitive regions, a lifetime of seeing people living in the wilderness and using it, that there is a hard core of wilderness need in everyone, a core that makes its spiritual values a basic human necessity. There is no hiding it….Unless we can preserve places where the endless spiritual needs of man can be fulfilled and nourished, we will destroy our culture and ourselves.”

...as opposed to Leopold's line,

"I step from my cabin door, bearing in either hand my emblems of sovereignty, a coffee pot and notebook. I seat myself on a bench, facing the white wake of the morning star. I set the pot beside me. I extract a cup from my shirt front, hoping none will notice its informal mode of transport. I get out my watch, pour coffee, and lay notebook on knee."

Olson went on weeks-long canoe trips Just Because. That dude was awesome.
https://www.mnopedia.org/person/olson-sigurd-f-1899-1982
https://www.minnesotagoodage.com/voices/mn-history/2019/12/the-living-legacy-of-sigurd-olson/

posted by wenestvedt at 7:06 AM on August 16, 2021 [2 favorites]

Seconding FencingGal, my English teacher read the poem out loud for us before we started the book. It was really interesting! He did his best with the Scots pronunciation. There are recordings on YouTube.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43816/to-a-mouse-56d222ab36e33
posted by meemzi at 7:15 AM on August 16, 2021

If you are looking for something outside the Western Canon, Rabindranath Tagore wrote a LOT of nature poetry about the Indian subcontinent. Here is an academic article on eco-consciousness in Tagore's work, with several examples. Mostly written at the turn of the last century, so should all be public domain.
posted by basalganglia at 9:32 AM on August 16, 2021 [3 favorites]

Fat City by Leonard Gardner has many beautiful passages about fruit and vegetable picking, as well as the process of finding that work. It's a stunning book.
posted by mani at 9:35 AM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

And Robert Service's poems are a bit blow-hard by modern standards, but at that age they caught my ear, what with the woodmen and the miners and the drinking and the violent death.

Goodnes sknows, the close-to-my-heart "The Cremation of Sam McGee" would be a good one to lighten up a Friday! Full text here
posted by wenestvedt at 9:59 AM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

John Clare! There’s plenty to choose from, but here’s a lovely example.
posted by penguin pie at 2:12 PM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

By naming his storyteller within the story 'George Milton', Steinbeck seems to be echoing Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village Hampden, that, with dauntless breast,
The little tyrant of his fields withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

Th' applause of list'ning senates to command,
The threats of pain and ruin to despise,
To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,
And read their history in a nation's eyes,

Their lot forbade: nor circumscrib'd alone
Their growing virtues, but their crimes confined;
Forbade to wade thro' slaughter to a throne,
And shut the gates of mercy on mankind,

The struggling pangs of conscious truth to hide,
To quench the blushes of ingenuous shame,
Or heap the shrine of luxury and pride
With incense kindled at the Muse's flame.

— lines 53–72

Like Of Mice and Men, Gray's Elegy concerns itself with the inequities and iniquities of rural existence. But it was published in 1751 -- 25 years before the American Revolution and 38 before the French -- and Gray's quietism is a harbinger of Things to Come, whereas Steinbeck's parable was published in 1937, the first year of FDR's second term, and comes across more as a cautionary tale.
posted by jamjam at 3:43 PM on August 16, 2021

Seamus Heany, Digging

Have they studied Walden yet? It might be interesting to contrast Thoreau's gentleman-farmer-philosopher take on plowing / building / living simply vs. what it looks like for folks who can't go into town to drop laundry off with mom and have dinner with friends.
posted by momus_window at 5:13 PM on August 16, 2021 [1 favorite]

There's a lot of Issues with the books, but some of Laura Ingalls Wilder's LHotP books have nice passages about the work required just to live.

Farmer Boy in particular includes many vignettes about farm life that are detailed and readable, and describe the chores that are deliberately dumped back on poor old Mom in Walden.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:43 AM on August 17, 2021

Edward Abbey's non fiction work would probably be a good place to look, Desert Solitaire is a good place to start. Also, several of the beat writers, Jack Kerouac, and Gary Snyder specifically have written on working in nature.
posted by evilDoug at 10:47 AM on August 17, 2021