Nature

Gillian Clarke’s poem “Wings” is abundant with nature imagery that presents the multiple facets of the speaker’s experience, which ranges from fear to love. Beginning in the first stanza, the speaker describes waking in the night to “feel the moon’s glaciers / slide their silvers over the bed” (2-3). This sensory image particularly appeals to the reader’s vision and thermoception, conjuring in the mind’s eye the frigid and slow movement of glaciers. The sibilance of the “s” sound in “slide” and “silvers” contributes to this effect. Glaciers are large masses of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface. They often symbolize the power and fragility of nature. In the poem, glaciers bend the usual rules of space and time to allow moonlight to move in such an impactful way. This widens the scope of...