Metaphor and Grammar in the Poetic Representation of Nature

Abstract

This article is based on two assumptions which have already been evidenced in the literature of environmental discourse analysis. The first is that the normal congruent active material process clause (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), if the empathy hierarchy (Langacker 1991) is imposed upon it, tends to represent humans as acting in a unidirectional way upon a passive environment (Goatly 2002, 2007). The second is that much pro-environmental discourse, such as the Worldwatch Institute's reports, for the most part adopts this grammar and thereby undervalues the power of nature as a force independent of humans but with power over them (Goatly and Hiradhar 2016). This article builds on work already done in Goatly (2000, 2007) and Goatly and Hiradhar (2016) on non-congruent grammar, coordination , along with personification and other forms of metaphor, to represent the human-nature relationship in ways which are more in keeping with modern science, and more helpful from an ecological viewpoint. The poetic texts discussed are taken from Wordsworth's The Prelude, Edward Thomas' Collected Poems and Alice Oswald's Woods etc. Besides the use of grammatical coordination and metaphor/literalisation to blur the human nature boundary, they illustrate the use of nominalisations, ergative verbs, the activation of tokens and existents, the emphasis on nature as sayer and experiencer, rather than goal, which is a grammar (and use of metaphor) quite different from the patterns in so-called environmental and news discourse. Keywords: environmental discourse analysis, metaphor, personification, poetic texts 1. THE NEED FOR AN ECOLOGICAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently warned us: Human influence on the climate system is clear, and recent anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the highest in history. Recent climate changes have had widespread impacts on human and natural systems. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, and sea level has risen. Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere, where such assessment is possible (medium confidence). (http://ipcc.ch/pdf/ assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf retrieve 28/7/2015) The consequences of global warming could be disastrous: extreme weather, causing droughts, heatwaves and floods, and the resulting loss of life, infrastructure and agriculture. Melting permafrost would release methane (a far more dangerous greenhouse gas than CO 2), multiplying these threats.