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The Soul Reflected in Nature
By Dr. Barbara Cooper The Song of the Lark is rich in images drawn from nature: trees,
flowers, moonlight, rock, and water. These images reflect back to the young Thea a symbolic truth that she may not realize until years later, when she remembers the land where she spent her youth, the
western landscape that is the source of her strength and identity as woman and artist.
Trees
The cottonwoods are "light-reflecting, wind-loving trees of the desert, whose roots are always seeking
water and whose leaves are always talking about it, making the sound of rain." As a girl, Thea admired these trees because they reminded her of the tenacity that people of the desert and plains needed to
survive. Later, as a young woman, she makes another connection between people and trees when she visits Arizona, where the tall, straight pines that grow at the base of San Francisco Mountain remind her of the
Navajo, with their dignified reserve. Trees signify the qualities Thea needs as an artist: strength, tenacity, and connection to the land. Just as the tree grows from a seed that takes root in the
soil, she grows into a singer who at the height of her creative powers feels "like a tree bursting into bloom."
Flowers
Out in the sand hills, young Thea gazes "into the yellow
prickly pear blossoms with their thousand stamens," and in Mexican town she sits with Mrs. Tellamantez on her porch beneath the moon, and counts the moonflowers unfurling their wide throats. When Thea returns
to Mexican Town a few years later, she notices the moonflowers "wide open and of an unearthly white" and the moon itself "like a great pale flower in the sky." When she bursts forth into
song, the Mexicans see her as a lily, "white and gold, like Easter!" The references to Easter, the moon and flowers, clearly signify the birth--the bringing to light--of Thea's hidden,
creative self. Her imagery in Song of the Lark spiritual birth coincides with her blossoming into womanhood.
Rock
At the end of the book, when Thea has become a great opera singer, she is asked
where she gets her inspiration as an artist. "Out of the rocks, out of the dead people", she replies. She is referring to her sojourn in Panther Canyon, where she lived alone in an
ancient cliff dwelling, and experienced an almost mystical identification with the ancient ones--the Indians--who had made these dwellings in the rock. They taught her "the inevitable hardness of human
life. No artist gets very far who doesn't know that. And you can't do it with your mind. You have to realize it in your body, somehow; deep."
Water
It is in Panther
Canyon that Thea receives a kind of baptism when she bathes every morning in the sunlit stream at the bottom of the gorge. She feels as if she were bathing in the very element of life itself: "In the rapid
restless heart of it, flowing swifter than the rest, there was a continuity of life that reached back into old time." The physical element of water becomes transmuted into a spiritual element; the bath
becomes, for Thea, a ritual of "ceremonial gravity" that brings to her a revelation which will transform her art. It is during one of her baths that she has a revelation, when the image of an
Indian woman carrying her water jar flashes in her mind: "what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying
past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?... In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural
intervals." Study Questions and Suggested Activities to accompany the essay 1. After reading the essay, read Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Rhodora." A rhodora is a kind of flower that occasionally grows wild in the woods. In this short
poem, Emerson answers the question, "Whence (for what purpose) is the Rhodora?" Emerson makes the point that, "if eyes are meant for seeing, then beauty is its own excuse for being." He further
suggests that the flower is created by a divine power, just as man is, and the purpose of man and flower are equally valid. Compare this theme with Cather's reflections on nature in The Song of the Lark.
2. In what way does Willa Cather's main character, Thea Kronborg, draw power and strength from nature to nurture her artistic temperament? If there must be a recognition of "the inevitable hardness of
human life," then how does nature serve to soften that hardness while allowing the artist the strength to endure and to persevere? 3. Cather draws a verbal picture of the clay pots of the ancients.
She then extends her metaphor, comparing Thea's singing voice to a similar vessel, showing nature reflected in the art form. Discuss the connection that can be found between other forms of nature as reflected in
art. Give specific examples which will extend your metaphor or analogy. 4. In the poem "Thanatopsis" by William Cullen Bryant, the author says that we are, "brother to the senseless rock." This piece
presents a pantheistic view that man is linked to nature as though there is a spark of something divine that flows through us all. He shows all who have lived as a "timeless caravan," marching to the same
destination where we join in an eternal brotherhood. In Cather's novel, Thea claims she got her inspiration as an artist "Out of the rocks, out of the dead people." Is hers a pantheistic view as well?
Compare the themes suggested by these two very different authors. 5. In the essay "The Soul Reflected in Nature" the writer has given us discussions of specific natural images developed in The Song of the Lark
. Using the essay as a model, add paragraphs that include other natural symbols, page numbers and explanations of how Willa Cather used these images to develop and support her major themes throughout the novel.
Questions were developed by Gail Lindenberg who teaches English/Humanities at Nogales High School in La Puente, California. |
