Nature and Its Meanings

Wright is a conservationist as well as a poet. A drought, therefore, might seem a strange subject for an environmentalist intent on giving nature a positive image. Perhaps then, the drought in "Drought Year" is primarily anthropogenic (human-caused), like the Dust Bowl disaster in Thirties America. This would show nature as victimized by human action, something a conservationist might want to stress. There is, however, no evidence for this. Wright's drought seems solely due to lack of rain.

Perhaps Wright meant to reinvigorate nature with awesome power so as to make humans cower, to stop people from swaggering because they dominate the earth. Readers would therefore be meant to identify with the poem's victims: horse, eel, and "seething skull." Still another theory why a conservationist would risk giving nature a negative image is that Wright might have felt she was too romantic about nature. Thus...