A Poet of the Landscape

I love stories with moody settings. This is why I’m recommending The Outermost House, even though it’s not a work of fiction. Beston’s lyrical writing captures seasonal changes and sensory details with such beauty. In fact, he even called himself the “poet of the landscape.”

How lovely is that?

In my own writing, I work to capture the moods of nature. Using only language, this can be a challenge. But I believe being enormously inspired by nature, like Beston, certainly helps.

It’s the simple things of which give me the greatest pleasure: the way the sun plays on the surface of the lake, the clouds casting lazy shadows across the valley floor, the way sounds of the forest become amplified in the darkness during summer nights.

Beston felt that “whatever attitude to human existence you fashion for yourself, know that it is valid only if it be the shadow of an attitude to nature…touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.”

I snapped this photo during a late afternoon walk and thought of a passage from Henry Beston’s The Outermost House. He writes: “During the winter the world of the dunes and the great beach was entirely my own, and I lived at the Fo’castle as undisturbed as Crusoe on his island.”

Here at my mountain cabin I often feel the same, as the summer residents have returned to their homes in warmer locales. And like Beston, I too feel as if I have the entire valley to myself, to celebrate the peace and tranquility that this time of year brings.

And yet, here is another passage of Beston’s, which I feel describes the winter sky in my photo: “There is a winter change of color, as well. The warm golden quality vanishes and is replaced by a tone of cold silver-grey, which makes no flashing answer to the sun.”