101 Inspiring Poems About Nature
February 23, 2025
For as long as humans have been writing poetry, poets have been turning to the natural world for inspiration. Whether they were singing an oral epic around a roaring fire thousands of years ago, or they’re posting their notes-app musings on Instagram today, poets have always been writing poems about nature. From the spread of stars in the night sky and the shattering crack of thunder overhead, down to the tiniest beetle traversing a windowpane and the life contained in a mustard seed. Poems about nature can vary so widely because the natural world itself is so vibrant, vast, and multifaceted.
No matter when a nature poem was composed, it has something to show us. Some of the poems below were written hundreds or even thousands of years ago. But the elements of nature in these poems are still recognizable today, which can remind us of the long meandering life of planet Earth, and our own small place in it.
Poetry List (Continued)
More recent poems about nature often confront our own human impact on the natural world. The Anthropocene (what some historians call our current human-centered era) has given us some of the most interesting, intense, and poignant nature poetry. Poets and other kinds of writers are often the cultural “canary in the coal mine,” drawing our attention to the most pressing issues of our day and their potential consequences.
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Seeing all of these poems about nature side by side, spanning the centuries from Wang Wei to Ada Limón, we might find ourselves inspired too. To go out for a walk and pay attention to the distinct songs of each bird. To plan a trip to the mountains or the sea or make a change in our own community that might preserve local nature. Or maybe even, to write a nature poem ourselves.
101 Inspiring Poems About Nature
1) [“As the sweet-apple”] by Sappho (circa 580 BCE); translated by Dan Beachy-Quick (2023)
“As the sweet-apple reddens on the highest branch, / high on the highest branch”
One of the greatest poets of antiquity, Sappho’s work has been compiled and credited to her mostly in short fragments. This gives the poems a riddle-like quality, like this brief one about the apple that escapes human hands.
2) “Zazen on Ching-t’ing Mountain” by Li Bai (circa 750); translated by Sam Hamill (2000)
“The birds have vanished down the sky. / Now the last cloud drains away.”
3) “A View of the Han River” by Wang Wei (circa 760); translated by Witter Bynner and Kiang Kang-Hu (1922)
“This river runs beyond heaven and earth, / Where the color of mountains both is and is not.”
4) “Your laughter turns the world to paradise” by Rumi (circa 1250); translated by Haleh Liza Gafori (2022)
“When I brood like a rain cloud, / laughter flashes through me. / It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.”
5) “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)” by William Shakespeare (1609)
“Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, / And often is his gold complexion dimmed.”
One of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets, this poem uses its natural imagery to strike a comparison with the speaker’s beloved. While the various elements of nature in the poem—the summer season, the fickle sun, the wind—come and go, the speaker asserts that the beloved will live on forever in the lines of this poem.
Poetry List (Continued)
6) “In Kyoto…” by Matsuo Bashō (circa 1680); translated by Jane Hirshfield (2017)
“In Kyoto, / hearing the cuckoo, / I long for Kyoto.”
Bashō is considered the greatest master of the Japanese short-form poem, the haiku. This particular haiku is an enigmatic piece. It seems to express the speaker’s paradoxical homesickness or nostalgia for a beloved place while he is still in that place.
7) “Lines Written in Early Spring” by William Wordsworth (1798)
“The birds around me hopped and played, / Their thoughts I cannot measure:— / But the least motion which they made / It seemed a thrill of pleasure.”
8) “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” by William Wordsworth (1807)
“I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o’er vales and hills, / When all at once I saw a crowd, / A host, of golden daffodils”
9) “Autumn Song” by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1848)
“sleep seems a goodly thing / In Autumn at the fall of the leaf?”
10) “Sonnet—Baugmaree” by Toru Dutt (1882)
“A sea of foliage girds our garden round, / But not a sea of dull unvaried green, / Sharp contrasts of all colours here are seen.”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
11) “Merry Autumn” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1886)
“A butterfly goes winging by; / A singing bird comes after; / And Nature, all from earth to sky, / Is bubbling o’er with laughter.”
12) “A Winter Scene” by Henry David Thoreau (1895)
“To their retreat / I track the feet / Of mice that eat / The apple’s root.”
This poem builds the titular winter scene in the mind as it runs down the page. Short lines and a regular jaunty rhyme scheme conjure a steady walking pace, as if the speaker’s footsteps are tramping through the snowy wood.
13) “The Calf-Path” by Sam Foss (1895)
“But how the wise old wood gods laugh, / Who saw the first primeval calf.”
This longer narrative poem tells the humorous parable of a calf’s wobbling path through a wood, which is then followed by other animals, and then eventually humans (and lots of them!). The poem winds its way through time like the calf-path itself, and lands at a possible moral lesson, although the speaker tries (and fails) to hold his tongue on the moralizing.
14) “Nature” by Henry David Thoreau (1895)
“For I’d rather be thy child / And pupil, in the forest wild, / Than be the king of men elsewhere”
15) “Dandelions” by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1896)
“Welcome children of the Spring, / In your garbs of green and gold”
Poetry List (Continued)
16) “The Way Through the Woods” by Rudyard Kipling (1910)
“They shut the road through the woods / Seventy years ago.”
17) “Song of Summer” by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913)
“Squir’l a-tippin’ on his toes, / So’s to hide an’ view you; / Whole flocks o’ camp-meetin’ crows / Shoutin’ hallelujah.”
18) “The Moon is distant from the Sea – (387)” by Emily Dickinson (1914)
“The Moon is distant from the Sea — / And yet, with Amber Hands — / She leads him — docile as a Boy — / Along appointed Sands.”
19) “The Vantage Point” by Robert Frost (1915)
“I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant, / I look into the crater of the ant.”
This poem by Robert Frost, a master of the American pastoral, explores a feeling that is still all too relevant today. It captures the opposing tugs of the human world and the natural world, while acknowledging that we long for both of them.
20) “A Winter Blue Jay” by Sara Teasdale (1915)
“In ecstasy the earth / Drank the silver sunlight; / In ecstasy the skaters / Drank the wine of speed”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
21) “Evening” by H.D. (1916)
“The light passes / from ridge to ridge, / from flower to flower—”
22) “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens (1917)
“Icicles filled the long window / With barbaric glass. / The shadow of the blackbird / Crossed it, to and fro.”
A classic and oft-imitated poem, Stevens breaks the body of the poem into thirteen brief numbered stanzas. Each one takes a different angle at observing or meditating on the image of the blackbird.
23) “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer (1917)
“I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree.”
This brief lyric poem manages to be both earnest and ironic. While the speaker acknowledges upfront that a poem isn’t much compared to a tree, he goes on to praise and celebrate the tree’s beauty anyway. It ends up being a statement on poems about nature in general. The beauty can’t compare, but still we try.
24) “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale (1918)
“Robins will wear their feathery fire / whistling their whims on a low fence-wire”
This poem uses beautiful natural imagery to lull the reader into a world without humans. A subtle but heartwrenching poem that allows—or perhaps demands—that the reader comes to their own conclusion. Written near the end of World War I and during the flu pandemic of 1918, it’s hard not to read it as a lament for humanity and a declaration against war. It even inspired a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name.
25) “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1921)
“You can no longer quiet me with the redness / Of little leaves opening stickily. / I know what I know.”
Poetry List (Continued)
26) “Fall, Leaves, Fall” by Emily Brontë (1921)
“Every leaf speaks bliss to me, / fluttering from the autumn tree.”
This brief poem captures the turn of the season from autumn to winter. The speaker’s desire for the snow and darkness and decay subverts reader’s expectations, since a more typical ode would be to spring and summer’s flourishing. The poem nudges us to consider the importance of our seasons of rest and dormancy.
27) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost (1923)
“The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.”
28) “[Again and again, even though we know love’s landscape]” by Rainer Maria Rilke (1923); translated by Edward Snow (1996)
“again and again the two of us walk out together / under the ancient trees”
In this brief poem by the great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the natural world is used as a metaphor for the landscape of love. Through rich imagery, the speaker proposes that the experience of love is a place we go, together, and that we keep going there, even though we know how it ends.
29) “A Desert Memory” by Bertrand N.O. Walker (Hen-toh) (1924)
“Lonely, open, vast and free, / The dark’ning desert lies”
30) “Dream Variations” by Langston Hughes (1924)
“Then rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree / While night comes on gently, / Dark like me—”
This brief lyric poem takes the form of a pair of stanzas that mirror each other with slight variations (as mentioned in the title). The speaker of the poem is celebratory, ecstatic even, in seeing himself reflected in the beauty and darkness of the night.
Poems About Nature (Continued)
31) “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba” by James Joyce (1927)
“And heard the prairie grasses sighing: / No more, return no more!”
32) “Fireflies in the Garden” by Robert Frost (1928)
“Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, / And here on earth come emulating flies”
33) “(With a flower) 80” by Emily Dickinson (1929)
“Syllables of velvet, / Sentences of plush”
34) “The Snow Storm” by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1939)
“No hawk hangs over in this air: / The urgent snow is everywhere.”
35) “On What Planet” by Kenneth Rexroth (1940)
“The warm air flows imperceptibly seaward; / The autumn haze drifts in deep bands / Over the pale water.”
Poetry List (Continued)
36) “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)
“I caught a tremendous fish / and held him beside the boat / half out of water, with my hook / fast in a corner of his mouth.”
37) “Little Exercise” by Elizabeth Bishop (1946)
“weeds in every crack / are relieved to be wet, the sea to be freshened.”
38) “End of Summer” by Stanley Kunitz (1953)
“I stood in the disenchanted field / Amid the stubble and the stones”
39) “Winter Colony” by Anne Sexton (1959)
“We ride the sky down, / our voices falling back behind us, / unraveling like smooth threads.”
40) “Blackberrying” by Sylvia Plath (1960)
“The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
41) “Montana Pastoral” by J.V. Cunningham (1960)
“There is dust in this air. I saw in the heat / Grasshoppers busy in the threshing wheat.”
Cunningham’s poem subverts the typical romanticizing elements of the pastoral form. The speaker points out the bleak realities of rural life: “the fear, thirst, hunger, and this huddled chill.”
42) “A Good Day” by Norman MacCaig (1962)
“A heron, folded round himself / Stands in the ebb, as I in mine.”
43) “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams (1962)
“the whole pageantry // of the year was / awake tingling / near // the edge of the sea”
This ekphrastic poem is responding to the landscape painting of the same name by Pieter Breugel the Elder. Just as visual art about nature can use specific techniques such as composition, brushstroke, and color to celebrate the natural world, poems about nature can utilize imagery, metaphor, sound, and the poetic line to do the same.
44) “For a Coming Extinction” by W.S. Merwin (1967)
“Leaving behind it the future / Dead / And ours”
An ironic sort of elegy, this poem grapples with our human impact on other species. Through an imagined conversation with God, the speaker insists (perhaps even begs) the gray whale to explain to God that it is “we [humans] who are important.”
45) “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry (1968)
“I go and lie down where the wood drake / rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
Poetry List (Continued)
46) “The Two-headed Calf” by Laura Gilpin (1977)
“But tonight he is alive and in the north / field with his mother.”
47) “The Garden” by Mark Strand (1979)
“It shines in the garden, / in the white foliage of the chestnut tree, / in the brim of my father’s hat / as he walks on the gravel.”
48) “November for Beginners” by Rita Dove (1981)
“Snow would be the easy / way out—that softening / sky like a sigh of relief / at finally being allowed / to yield.”
49) “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver (1988)
“—hunger is the only story / he has heard in his entire life that he could believe.”
Mary Oliver is well-known for her vivid and contemplative poems about nature. This poem is no different. The speaker uses an extended meditation on the kingfisher to consider aspects of her own life and her own thinking, on death, happiness, hunger, and commitment.
50) “Vespers” by Louise Glück (1992)
“I planted the seeds, I watched the first shoots / like wings tearing the soil, and it was my heart / broken by the blight, the black spot so quickly / multiplying in the rows.”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
51) “The Red Poppy” by Louise Glück (1992)
“I have / a lord in heaven / called the sun, and open / for him, showing him / the fire of my own heart, fire / like his presence.”
In this poem, Glück attempts a tricky task: taking on the persona and imagined voice of a non-human subject. From the perspective of the poppy flower, the poem speaks directly to a “you” that might be the reader, or maybe humanity at large. It lays out the similarities between these very different (or not so different) living things.
52) “A Green Crab’s Shell” by Mark Doty (1995)
“A gull’s / gobbled the center, // leaving this chamber / —size of a demitasse— / open to reveal // a shocking, Giotto blue.”
53) “New Moon” by Ted Kooser (1995)
“a great ball of blue shadow, / yet somehow it shines, keeps up / an appearance. For hours tonight, / I walked beneath it, learning.”
54) “Negotiations with a Volcano” by Naomi Shihab Nye (1995)
“Please think of us as we are, tiny, with skins that burn easily.”
55) “Gic to Har” by Kenneth Rexroth (2002)
“Suddenly I remember / Coming home from swimming / In Ten Mile Creek, / Over the long moraine in the early summer evening, / My hair wet, smelling of waterweeds and mud.”
Poetry List (Continued)
56) “The Cypress Broke” by Mahmoud Darwish (2003); translated by Fady Joudah (2007)
“The cypress broke like a minaret, and slept on / the road upon its chapped shadow, dark, green, / as it has always been.”
57) “Final Autumn” by Annie Finch (2003)
“Light drives lower and one bluejay crams / our cold memories out past the sun”
58) “Kyoto: March” by Gary Snyder (2004)
“Jupiter half-way / High at the end of night- / Meditation. The dove cry / Twangs like a bow.”
59) “The Snow Arrives After Long Silence” by Nancy Willard (2004)
“The hungry deer walk // on the risen loaves of snow. / You can follow the broken hearts / their hooves punch in its crust.”
60) “Porch Swing in September” by Ted Kooser (2005)
“a small brown spider has hung out her web / on a line between porch post and chain / so that no one may swing without breaking it.”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
61) “Last August Hours Before the Year 2000” by Naomi Shihab Nye (2005)
“What better blessing than to move without hurry / under trees?”
62) “Song for Autumn” by Mary Oliver (2005)
“The pond / stiffens and the white field over which / the fox runs so quickly brings out / its long blue shadows.”
63) “Every Land” by Ursula K. LeGuin (2006)
“Watch where the branches of the willows bend / See where the waters of the rivers tend / Graves in the rock, cradles in the sand / Every land is the holy land”
64) “Museum of Stones” by Carolyn Forché (2010)
“schist and shale, hornblende, / agate, marble, millstones, ruins of choirs and shipyards”
65) “September Tomatoes” by Karina Borowicz (2013)
“It feels cruel. Something in me isn’t ready / to let go of summer so easily.”
Poetry List (Continued)
66) “Imaginary Morning Glory” by C.D. Wright (2014)
“Whether or not the water was freezing. The body / would break its sheathe.”
67) “How the Milky Way Was Made” Natalie Diaz (2015)
“To save our fish, we lifted them from our skeletoned river beds, / loosed them in our heavens, set them aster—”
68) “Praise the Rain” by Joy Harjo (2015)
“Praise the roads on earth and water. / Praise the eater and the eaten.”
This poem by the former Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, is a jubilant praise poem honoring and celebrating the natural world and our place in it. The poet uses repetition and a regular rhythm to create a song-like quality that enhances the poem’s sense of praise.
69) “Speaking Tree” by Joy Harjo (2015)
“Some humans say trees are not sentient beings, / But they do not understand poetry—”
70) “A Small Needful Fact” by Ross Gay (2015)
“some of them, in all likelihood, / continue to grow, continue / to do what such plants do”
This poem is an elegy to Eric Garner. Using direct language and repetition of “perhaps” and “in all likelihood,” the speaker approaches at a slant a subject which is impossible to look at directly.
Poems About Nature (Continued)
71) “Wildlife” by Franny Choi (2016)
“suddenly then, each pump and spigot spouted forth bees, // butterflies, short-horned lizards, plovers and prickly pears, grizzlies, / snakes, owls of all feather and shape”
72) “No Meteor” by Kathy Fagan (2016)
“The night one / gold star shook / loose from blue / firmament, I learned / they were neither / star nor blue.”
73) “Letter to the Northern Lights” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (2016)
“Of course you didn’t show when we went / searching for you, but we found other lights: firefly, / strawberry moon, a tiny catch of it in each other’s teeth.”
74) “Black Cherries” by W.S. Merwin (2016)
“Late in May as the light lengthens / toward summer the young goldfinches / flutter down through the day”
75) From “understory” by Craig Santos Perez (2016)
“Corn for / cattle feed // and syrup— / runoff turns // [our] streams / red— poisons / lo’i”
The speaker of this poem is an expectant father lamenting about the world his daughter will be born into. Short lines and fast-moving stanzas seem to mirror the speaker’s helplessness in the face of industrialization, pollution, and the degradation of the landscape around him.
Poetry List (Continued)
76) “The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings.” by Donika Kelly (2017)
“I imagine the tide simply went out / without them. I imagine they cannot // feel the black flies charting the raised hills / of their eyes.”
77) “Characteristics of Life” by Camille T. Dungy (2017)
“I move as the currents move, with the breezes. / What part of your nature drives you?”
78) “Dead Stars” by Ada Limón (2018)
“What if we stood up with our synapses and our flesh and said, No. / No, to the rising tides.”
This rich and evocative poem celebrates the natural world while also firmly rooting us in the human. Limón describes the sound of taking out the trash: “the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.” This praise of the natural world turns about halfway through the poem towards a call to action, a call to protect the natural world during this fraught Anthropocene era.
79) “To the Rain” by Ursula K. LeGuin (2018)
“Mother rain, manifold, measureless, / falling on fallow, on field and forest”
80) “Disentangling a Gray Whale” by Maya Khosla (2019)
“We close in, hesitant, // wondering if freeing her is worth the risk / of a nervous tail slap into oblivion.”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
81) “First Snow” by Arthur Sze (2019)
“You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail: // when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel, / but when it stops, it blends in again.”
82) “The Tradition” by Jericho Brown (2019)
“Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt”
83) “Purple” by Kwame Dawes (2019)
“Walking, I drew my hand over the lumpy / bloom of a spray of purple”
84) “Native Species” by Keetje Kuipers (2019)
“In the spring the men come out again to clear the land, / yellow Cat dozers popping up on distant hillsides // like morels to be collected after the first warm days / of May.”
85) “December Morning in the Desert” Alberto Ríos (2019)
“The myriad stars making bright the black, / As if the sky itself had been snowed upon.”
Poetry List (Continued)
86) “Carrot” by Leah Naomi Green (2020)
“Take all summer, / your ember // from the sun, / its walking meditation.”
87) “River Pieces” by Don Domanski (2021)
“to listen to the music of the river / is to hear a final music”
This poem is presented as a sequence of brief stanzas separated by asterisks. Each one is an enigmatic snapshot, a thought or observation that crosses the speaker’s mind and then passes on into the next. This meandering path of the mind mirrors the speaker’s meandering walk along the river, looking and thinking.
88) “Volta” by Karina Borowicz (2021)
“The gouged mud of the field / has frozen solid, sharp / even through boots.”
89) “Who Will Tell Them?” by Michael Simms (2021)
“It turns out you can kill the earth, / Crack it open like an egg.”
90) “Pastoral” by Forrest Gander (2021)
“as if the far / Sonoma mountains / weren’t equally ready / to be beheld as / the dead / fly on the sill”
Poems About Nature (Continued)
91) “once the magnolia has blossomed” by Ed Roberson (2021)
“spring, in tomorrow’s rain, comes / a hose-down of the scene as / of an annual / murder”
92) “Ode to Plant Momdom” by L. Renée (2022)
“This is the part / I imagine feels most like delivery, transferring / a seedling from a tiny tray, pulling out its ribbed / body and carrying close the exposed bounty / to a new home, some pot with room enough / for growth.”
93) “wing” by Roque Salas Rivera (2022)
“The life of the sea is the wave; / the wave of the bird is the wing”
Following a string of associations and metaphors, the poet takes us from the natural world, to the human world, and back again. The sea, the bird, and the beloved give way to hatred and war, only to return again. And the cycle continues.
94) “Aubade” by Marco Yan (2022)
“Another year of rain and terrible air, then I see the street again —”
95) “I Went Out to Hear” by Leila Chatti (2023)
“I heard the beating / of bats’ wings before / the air troubled above / my head, turned to look / and saw them gone.”
Poetry List (Continued)
96) “Green Tomatoes in Fire Season” by Tess Taylor (2023)
“Firm pale green skins, / fine-coated in ash. // Our fire season goes all autumn now, / though today’s fire is not // yet near to us.”
97) “let grow more winter fat / wine-cup / western wild rose” by Camille T. Dungy (2023)
“where there once was prairie / a few remaining fireflies abstract themselves / over roads and concrete paths”
98) “Late Autumnal, with Cockroach” by Erin Belieu (2024)
“still / it seems miraculous, how much insists / on surviving, despite us”
This poem is a begrudging ode to the cockroach and all the pests we try to rid ourselves of. Rooted in a very human world full of pest control men, rat bait stations, and fuming sewers, this poem celebrates the relentless drive of life to keep begetting life, no matter the odds.
99) “Miracle of Fishes, Texarkana” by Hannah Smith (2024)
“It must be a sight to see, wet flopping flesh / emptied from the sky. It must look like a miracle: animal rain.”
100) “Little Blue Dot” by Shannan Mann (2024)
“Spying birds migrating away to warmer / mountains, I can almost fool myself / that there is such a place for me too.”
101) “What I Learned in Greenland” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (2024)
“There are not enough words / in the Kalaallisut language (or any language) / to prepare you for the five-hundred shades of blue // in icebergs.”
Poems about Nature from Antiquity to Now
This collection of poems celebrates, confronts, and meditates on many different aspects of the natural world. We hope it widens your view of what poems about nature can look like. Maybe you even found a new favorite poem buried in this list!
Looking for more poems? Check out these resources as well:
