We asked ten literary experts to recommend the climate poem that has spoken to them most powerfully. Their answers span over 200 years and a range of emotions from sorrow, to anger, fear and hope.
This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.
1. Death of a Field by Paula Meehan (2005)
Published in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Paula Meehan’s Death of a Field critiqued the environmental impact of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland.
The poem anticipates the destruction of the titular field by property developers with little regard for native ecologies: “The end of the field as we know it is the start of the estate.”
The global effects of the climate crisis are seen from a uniquely local perspective as the displacement of Irish wildlife mirrors the effect of colonial violence. “Some architect’s screen” is simply the latest iteration of imperial technologies that seek to plunder Irish landscapes. The poem gains further strength by refusing to replicate a hierarchical relationship to nature by preserving its many mysteries:
Who can know the yearning of yarrow
Or the plight of the scarlet pimpernel
Whose true colour is orange?
Jack Reid is a PhD Candidate in Irish literature
2. Darkness by Lord Byron (1816)
Darkness imagines the fallout of a volcanic eruption that has destroyed the Earth. The “dream” that the poem mentions was inspired by genuine weather conditions during the “year without a summer” in 1816, caused by the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the previous year.
Sulphur in the atmosphere caused darkness and low temperatures across Europe. In Lake Geneva, Lord Byron experienced the infamous “haunted summer” of darkness.
Byron’s depiction of climate catastrophe is bleak, with words like “crackling”, “blazing” and “consum’d” bearing resemblance to contemporary reports of wildfires caused by climate change. After a famine, all elements of Byron’s Earth, from the clouds to the tide, eventually cease to exist: “Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless– / A lump of death – a chaos of hard clay.” Read as a portent of the Anthropocene, Byron’s poem urges readers to seriously consider the future of mankind.
Katie MacLean is a PhD candidate in English Literature
3. Mont Blanc by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1817)
Byron’s close friend Percy Bysshe Shelley was also inspired by the “year without a summer”. He witnessed temperatures drop, volcanic ash hanging heavy in the air and crops failing. While his wife Mary used the gloomy climatic event to inform her novel Frankenstein (1818), Shelley channelled them into his poem Mont Blanc.
In his ode, Shelley describes a timeless “wall impregnable of beaming ice”. By drawing on his scientific reading, he then explains his fears regarding global cooling and the possibility of vast glaciers eventually covering the alpine valleys.
He imagines “the dwelling-place / Of insects, beasts, and birds” being obliterated and mankind forced to flee. While Shelley saw this process as “destin’d” and inevitable, it is clear that Mont Blanc is a poem with catastrophic climate change at its heart. In 2026, it is difficult to read in any other way.
Amy Wilcockson is a research fellow in Romantic literature
4. Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy (2012)
There’s something gloriously elastic about invertebrates: the spinelessness of a worm, the pulsing of the jellyfish, the curling of an octopus. Spiders, snails and bees, too, with their exoskeletons on display, invite us to see things “inside-out”.
These are the thoughts I have when I read Characteristics of Life by Camille T. Dungy, which opens with a snippet from a BBC news report claiming that “a fifth of animals without backbones could be at risk of extinction”. What would a world be without the “underneathedness” of the snail beneath its shell beneath the terracotta pot in the garden? Or “the impossible hope of the firefly” whose adult lives span only a handful of human weeks?
Dungy speaks from a “time before spinelessness was frowned upon”, and from a world where to dismiss a being as “mindless” (jellyfish have no brains) or even “wordless” would be “missing the point” entirely. As I think of these creatures that dwell beyond our usual line of vision – flying, crawling, tunnelling and swimming – I find my perspective on our beautiful world turning and shifting.
Janine Bradbury is a poet and a senior lecturer in contemporary writing and culture
5. Prayer at Seventy by Vicki Feaver (2019)
One of my favourite poems about climate change is Vicki Feaver’s Prayer at Seventy from her 2019 collection I Want! I Want!.
The speaker’s request of passing her “last years with less anxiety” appears to be denied by a god who first responds by changing her into “a tiny spider / launching into the unknown / on a thread of gossamer” and who, when she begs to “be a bigger / fiercer creature”, turns her into “a polar bear / leaping between / melting ice floes”.
Both images present creatures who are in precarious positions, their futures uncertain, reflecting the state of a person contemplating the unknowns of old age and death. But the poem moves beyond the personal. The reference to the melting ice floes is not solely metaphorical: it reminds us that the planet itself is in danger and every living thing is therefore vulnerable – and will be increasingly so.
Julie Gardner is a PhD candidate in literature
Read more: How poetry can sustain us through illness, bereavement and change
6. Walrus by Jessica Traynor (2022)
Walrus, from Jessica Traynor’s 2022 collection Pit Lullabies expresses the quiet anxiety a mother has for her child in the world of climate breakdown.
While stripping wallpaper from the box room of her house, the poet discovers a mural of the Walrus and the Carpenter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Traynor takes part of Lewis Carroll’s poem about the Walrus and the Carpenter walking along the beach, eating the vulnerable oysters, and weaves it into her own poem.
Carroll’s absurd verse includes what, at that time no doubt, seemed like an impossible image of a “boiling hot” sea. In the 21st century, this is no longer an absurdity, as Traynor knows. She makes a connection with Carroll’s poem, imploring her child:
Sleep as the sun rises and ice melts
and for want of the freeze a walrus
pushes further up a cliff-face.
It’s a complex poem that reimagines a key work of children’s literature, connecting it with the reality of the changing world. All the while the mother keeps her fears at bay for the sake of her child, “brows[ing] washing machines” with a “ball of tears” in her throat.
Ellen Howley is an assistant professor of English
7. Ocean Forest, co-created by the We Are the Possible programme
Ocean Forest is woven out of words, research, ideas and stories shared by scientists, educators, health professionals, youth leaders, writers and artists. They took part in creative writing workshops to co-create the anthology Planet Forest – 12 Poems for 12 Days for the UN Climate Conference in Brazil in 2025.
In the shallows, alert to change,
the minuscule, overlooked creatures
weave between seagrass, and weed –
live their shortened lives.
When ships pass overhead, when sands shift,
fish navigate swell, migrate beyond
where coral’s been bleached, through schools
of silenced whales and barely rooted mangroves
struggling to thrive in darkening water.
Deeper down,
pressure builds, species exist, unaware,
undisturbed. As heat and waves rise there’s hope
the unfound, the unnamed, the unpolluted
in the remotest ocean forests will survive.
Through uniting disciplines and voices the poem takes unexpected shifts. It demonstrates that climate change affects and erodes the habitats that lie beneath the surface and that urgent action is needed to protect d
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