I dwell in Possibility Man and the Natural World Quotes

OK, the first quatrain doesn't say anything directly about how awesome nature is. It does say, however, that the poetry house is awesome because it's loaded with windows and doors. And what do widows and doors open out into? Yup—nature. So even though we're not hit over the head with nature right from the get-go, the poem is already making nature seem like an awesome thing. The house is great because it gives the speaker a bunch of ways to get out into the amazing natural world.

The second quatrain kicks off with the first outright nature imagery in the poem by using a simile to compare the rooms of the poetry house with a forest of cedar trees. (Man, this house must be Pine-Sol fresh.) It's interesting how the window/door thing in the first quatrain made the house sound cool because it had easy access to nature, but now we find out that the house is itself a part of nature.

Now, we find out that the house has a sky for a roof. There's an awesome contradiction in this image. A roof of something is part of a contained structure, while the sky is infinite and "everlasting," making it totally uncontained. Could it be that defined structure of the house is meant to represent the structure of a poem, while the eternal sky is meant to represent all the thoughts that a poem can open in our minds? It's a little mind blowing to think about how something so finite as a few words on a page can send us into the infinite.