Nature’s contribution to health and healing is often overlooked, despite its benefits. However, nature has long informed poetry, and the locus amoenus (Latin for “pleasant place”) is a cornerstone of the genre of pastoral poetry, specifically. Depictions in verse of placid, mostly rural life are enjoyable to imagine, contrasting with a typical urban existence. Might pastoral poetry, then, offer healing potential for the afflicted—and why? Retreating into a locus amoenus might grant respite from harsher clinical environments. “Daydream” enacts this possibility as its speaker nostalgically imagines returning home to an idyllic landscape while hospitalized. The poem opens with disorienting and almost nightmarish language describing an inpatient experience that is anything but bucolic. However, imagery like snaking wires and irritating machines surrender to swelling valleys as the patient reminisces “by the porch” in the daydream of the poem’s title. Poetry allows the patient to revisit this other place, calmed by peaceful nights and comfortable sleep, a prospect that battles with the chaotic “clamor” and “hiccuping” on the hospital ward. The strong pull to this idealized place continues to occupy the patient’s thoughts, leaving us wondering if nature, whether through green-tinted reveries, gifted plants on windowsills, or hall passes to hospital courtyards, means more to our patients than we realize.
