Man versus Nature

"The Horizons of Rooms" makes a clear distinction between humanity and nature, showing how the two initially worked in cooperation but drifted apart over the centuries. In this poem, a room means any indoor space that is made by human control. It does not have to be entirely manufactured but can show as little human interference as moving a fallen tree to block the opening of a natural cave foundation.

According to the history that Merwin presents here, the early relationship between humans and nature was a mutually beneficial one. Nature provided shelter, as the poem describes in the sixth stanza, where the poem credits the cave with causing a child's birth. The human in the cave gives nature life, with heartbeats echoing off the cave's ice. In the beginning, at least, when humans were thought to be less mentally complex, there was a close bond...