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The Naturalist
His eye was keen, in bygone time
To birds and patterns in the woods—
To grass that roved like “corduroy”
To insects up the chain of goods.
“Annihilation”, he would warn,
To strike these latter out the way;
“A king of Cairo’d feel the loss
If picnic crawlers left, today.”
To each of these, and much besides,
He listened with a chuffing heart.
He wrote those lives distinctively
Though time denied him every part.
A dozen friends surrounded him
In hidden places in the trees
The sounds of birds, like names of books,
Invoking Shakespeare as they please.
He stole their favorite trick from them
And hid himself, covered by sticks
In something like a pinewood frame
Where watching them, he found his fix.
An old invention of the birds
Became the scientist’s delight
And made a place of sympathy
For people, in another light.
To birds and patterns in the woods—
To grass that roved like “corduroy”
To insects up the chain of goods.
“Annihilation”, he would warn,
To strike these latter out the way;
“A king of Cairo’d feel the loss
If picnic crawlers left, today.”
To each of these, and much besides,
He listened with a chuffing heart.
He wrote those lives distinctively
Though time denied him every part.
A dozen friends surrounded him
In hidden places in the trees
The sounds of birds, like names of books,
Invoking Shakespeare as they please.
He stole their favorite trick from them
And hid himself, covered by sticks
In something like a pinewood frame
Where watching them, he found his fix.
An old invention of the birds
Became the scientist’s delight
And made a place of sympathy
For people, in another light.
The rhymes all work, and the only place the stress pattern breaks is "covered." My reading is that this is a person who likes to observe nature, something like a birdwatcher, but who also appreciates the intricacies of an ecosystem so that even the less-desirable parts have their necessary niche. I can't come up with a relevance to the prompt, but I've never cared too much about that. I leave it on the honor system that the author was somehow inspired by it, even if it's not explicitly included. "Naturalist" doesn't single out insects, but they get the bulk of the attention here, with birds only mentioned in passing and the plants and earth not at all. I don't think it's necessarily an issue of rescoping the poem, but maybe the title needs to match the content a little more closely.