Welcome to the Swampscott Conservancy! We’re so happy you’ve come to visit us. Please enjoy your experience on this site, and we hope to see you at our next meeting or event!
The Conservancy’s Annual Members Meeting will be held remotely on Tuesday, April 15 at 6:30 pm. Click here to see meeting agenda.
View informative videos on our YouTube channel.
Read our Current Newsletter and catch up on past editions:
The Swampscott Conservancy is announcing a Youth Conservation Grant Program designed to provide support to Middle and High School students who wish to make positive environmental change in their community and more broadly New England.
Who can apply? Students who live or attend school in Lynn or Swampscott and are in Grades 6 to 12 are eligible to apply for funds to support a project aimed at making a difference in our natural world. Individual students or groups are welcome to apply. Click here for more information and to apply.
New Year’s Greetings from the Swampscott Conservancy!
Swampscott Conservancy’s Photo of the Month
The Swampscott Conservancy looking for high quality photos that capture Swampscott’s natural beauty – scenery, plants, and animals. Submit your photo as an email attachment to info@swampscottconservancy.org
Include your name, the location and the date where the photo was taken in Swampscott. If your photo is chosen as a “photo of the month”, it will be featured here as well as the Swampscott Conservancy’s Facebook and Instagram sites. Also, please be aware that the Conservancy may use your photo, with credit, in other contexts, such as in a calendar or note cards.
Swans at Fisherman’s Beach. Haiku and photo by Shelli Jankowski-Smith.
Nature in the Neighborhood – March 2025
There’s Poetry in Nature
Next month is National Poetry Month. Thirty days for us to celebrate poets and poetry!
In New England we have had our share of famed poets – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, and Mary Oliver, to name a few. These, as well as many other poets throughout history and across cultures, have delighted in the beauty of nature and contemplated our connection to it – although, in his poem “Trees,” Joyce Kilmer admits that a poem cannot capture the poetry that is already in nature (“I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree …”).
In honor of National Poetry Month, this month’s Nature in the Neighborhood shares with you several poems that nonetheless attempt to capture the wonder of nature and our spiritual and emotional relationship to it. Starting with the poem “Sleeping in the Forest,” where poet Mary Oliver shares her personal connection with nature:
I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
As we in New England well know, nature is not always as welcoming – especially in the month of March. The poem “March” by William Cullen Bryant highlights this month’s “in like a lion, out like a lamb” unpredictable weather, starting with the harshness of late winter:
The stormy March has come at last,
With wind, and cloud, and changing skies;
I hear the rushing of the blast
That through the snowy valley flies.
But, by the poem’s end, he leaves us with the promise of the warmth of spring:
Thou bring’st the hope of those calm skies,
And that soft time of sunny showers,
When the wide bloom, on earth that lies,
Seems of a brighter world than ours.
In her poem “Dear March – Come in,” Emily Dickinson has a more playful way to express this month:
Dear March —— Come in —
How glad I am —
I hoped for you before —
Put down your Hat —
You must have walked —
How out of Breath you are —
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest ——
Did you leave Nature well —
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me —
I have so much to tell ——
Ms. Dickinson’s nature poems can also be a little tongue in cheek – or perhaps tongue in beak? — as in the start of her poem “A Bird Came Down the Walk”:
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.
And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass—
And then hopped sidewise to the Wall
To let a Beetle pass—
William Wordsworth’s poem “The World Is Too Much With Us, written in 1807, shows us that concern over the environment started well before the 20th century. In this excerpt from his poem, he reflects on the way society’s obsession with material progress has caused it to lose touch with the natural world:
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
In an excerpt of her poem “Gratitude,” Mary Oliver encourages us to not lose touch with nature and to notice and appreciate the simple wonders of the natural world:
“What did you notice?
The dew snail; the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;
the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.
What did you hear?
The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
who has tasted salt in a world
out of my reach;
the harsh, salt music of the sea.”
And Wendell Berry, in his poem “In the Peace of Wild Things,” reminds us that we can find nature to be a source of renewal and strength:
“When despair for the world grows in me
And I wake in the night at the least sound
In fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
Rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
Along that same theme, I’ll end with one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, “Dust of Snow.” Here, the narrator’s shift from despondency to a happier mood highlights the transformative power that nature can have:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
You can celebrate National Poetry Month by reading poems about the natural world. Or perhaps by even penning your own poem! If you do write a poem, please send it to us at info@swampscottconservancy.org and we will include them on our webpage at swampscottconservancy.org.
In the meantime, we hope you’ll get outdoors and treasure the poetry that is in the nature in our neighborhood.
Toni Bandrowicz, President
The Swampscott Conservancy
Donations to the Swampscott Conservancy are an invaluable resource that must be tapped in the fulfilling of the crucial and altruistic goals that are laid out in our organization’s mission statement, and which are embodied by our dedicated members and our ongoing activities. All monetary contributions will be applied in the direct interest of furthering the natural wonder of our community; whether a member or not, your assistance is greatly appreciated and will be perceived in one way or another by any and all who immerse themselves in Swampscott’s natural, open spaces. Thank you for supporting The Conservancy and empowering your local community!
