MARCH is the month when nature unveils her warm charms, bringing a sigh of relief to the cold-weary masses. It's a time when you would want to stop and smell the flowers, or maybe experience the rumblings of poetry within the depths of your soul.

There's nothing quite like poetry for singing a paean to nature. Among the many celebrated nature poets, William Wordsworth is probably the most famous. What sets his work apart from others is that his poetry was, in fact, an act of nature-worship. Wordsworth perceived the presence of divinity and healing in nature, the presence of a higher spirit that he considered a `balm' to weary souls.

His poem, Tintern Abbey, depicts with much lucidity the unity that he found in all animate and inanimate objects -"A presence that disturbs me with the joy...a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused," the peace that they bring to him -"To them I may have owed another gift...that blessed mood...In which the heavy and the weary weight, Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened" and his confession to his worship--"I, so long a worshipper of Nature, hither came / Unwearied in that service with far deeper zeal / Of holier love". This act of worship was not confined to Wordsworth alone, though. Another poet who excelled in the linking of divinity to nature was Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore. His words work with much greater subtlety, like the `gentle breeze', which he is so fond of mentioning. "The world speaks to me in pictures, my soul answers in music."

Tagore defines nature as the thread of communion between the human and the divine, a bond of tenderness. His most famous work Gitanjali is full of songs to the higher spirit, with nature as a messenger. "The sunbeam comes upon this earth of mine with arms outstretched and stands at my door the livelong day to carry back to thy feet clouds made of my tears and sighs and songs."

You can identify more shades of this bond in Crossing: "Rebelliously I put out the light in my house and your sky surprised me with its stars". To him, nature holds the secrets to a higher truth and has lessons to teach us -"The stars are not afraid to appear like fireflies," and "Tiny grass, your steps are small but you possess the earth under your tread."

For Tagore, the physical union too is an act of spirituality, and this again he finds in nature --"I feel thy beauty, dark night, like that of the loved woman when she has put out the lamp", and "The trees come up to my window like the yearning voice of the dumb earth". He makes it the channel for attainment of enlightenment, not in the manner of the sage who renounces life for wilderness, but in the manner of the lover who embraces the pulsating life around him.

Food for the senses becomes food for the soul, as in these lines from Gitanjali --"Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight...No, I will never shut the doors of my senses. The delights of sight and hearing and touch will bear thy delight."

Sensual delights abound in the season around us now; maybe a little poetry might lead us to the doors of enlightenment. zehranaqvi@mydigitalfc.com