Poetry loves to anthropomorphize everything it sees partly because this is how metaphor, the fertilizer of the poetic, works. But it does so also because, almost regardless of the conditions, we human beings can scarcely resist projecting ourselves onto what we see.
This is not necessarily a bug in our system. Actually, it is our capacity to see ourselves in others, in animals, in objects, that makes the world so provocative, and out relation to the things around us so pregnant with meaning. As the Michigan poet Theodore Roethke wrote: “things shed light on things / and all the stones have wings.” It is the ability to see similarities between unlike things that allows for invention whether in poetry or in small unit tactics. Often, the solution to a problem is derived from the creative juxtaposition of two dissimilar things between which the imagination ignites a spark that generates the solution.
On the other hand, our endless anthropomorphizing is sometimes a defense against the loneliness of confronting reality as an individual person and is constituted chiefly of wishful thinking. When that defense succumbs to the obvious reality that, in fact, you are alone in feeling what you feel and facing what you face, as from time to time it inevitably will, the let-down can be difficult.
Both of these things are true and something like that is what this poem has to say.
Not about You
I want to say
that the farm braces
before the storm,
and the woodlot broods
like an adolescent
about to lose a fight.
But you know
it isn't true.
Absent the impulse
to project imperfect
knowledge onto what
comes next, the land
is fearless in any
relation to storms.
You see, this is not
about you. This
is about you too.
Great stuff, Patrick. One of my favorite definitions of creativity is "the ability to connect the seemingly unconnected" -- exactly as you're pointing out here.