#week8readingresponse

In reading the texts for this week, it became clear that the ways in which humans classify nature and phenomenon around them are based on the perceptions of the senses. For instance, in Ruskin’s “Storm Cloud of the 19th Century,” he paints a picture of two very different clouds that create different moods when they fall over the city. He describes the “ceaseless action of the calamitous wind” and the visual depictions that accompany it such as the clouds growing to twice their size. In his description, the reader can feel the presence of the clouds above as if the reader was in the storm. It becomes clear that the human way of classifying information is through relating it to the senses and tying it to previously experienced feeling.

 A similar notion is presented in a much scientific form in Will Alexander’s “On Scorpion & Swallows.” Alexander describes the physical characteristics of the scorpion as it fits into scientific classification. Each description of the scorpion’s “five-segmented posterior” or its “seven-segmented preabdomen” fits into this notion that humans categorize based off of previous human experience. The scientific classifications are simply another way of understanding the natural world and our attempt to classify it is our way of defining species based on physical observations. Each of the poets creates their own way of cataloguing the world whether it’s through Berssenbrugge’s description of a wood violet that is tied to an emotional response or Spahr’s poem of how we come to understand the world.