The title promises a conversion story. "Born-again" comes from the language of religious awakening, and it is attached to "naturalists", a word that suggests patient observers with notebooks. The poem itself, though, does not celebrate. It opens with a loss: "we are not ourselves / in a field." Its central idea is that real attention to the natural world does not make us masters of it. It unseats us. Rebirth here begins with the old self going missing.
Even that first sentence is slippery. "In a field" can mean a literal meadow, but it can also mean a field of study or a field of work, so the speakers are displaced both outdoors and in their roles as observers. The next line makes the reversal explicit: "but taken prisoner we find / a green page to retreat to." A naturalist usually does the taking, collecting specimens and pinning them down. Here the "we" are the ones captured. The poem then complicates its own image, because prisoners cannot retreat. Retreating is a choice, and being seized is not. By putting both in one sentence, the poem blurs the line between being overpowered and willingly withdrawing, and it suggests that surrender and refuge might be the same event.
The phrase "green page" carries much of the poem's weight. The field becomes something to read, and the page becomes somewhere to live. Any poem is a page, so the phrase also nudges us to see the poem as the retreat it describes. "Retreat" has a religious sense too, a withdrawal for reflection, which quietly loops back to "born-again" in the title. The line break after "we find" makes the discovery hang for a beat, and the line ends on a stranded "to". The sentence points toward a destination without quite arriving, which suits a poem about being unmoored.
The final stanza turns from sight to touch: "touching an abstract ground / like oaks engaged / with the night." "Touching" and "abstract" pull against each other, since we normally touch what is concrete. The word "abstract" literally means "drawn away", so the ground is one we can feel but not pin down. "Ground" is also doubly suggestive, meaning both earth and the background of a picture or page, which ties it back to the "green page". The simile can be read as attached to the touching. Oaks touch the ground with roots, unseen and in the dark, so the speakers come to resemble trees. "Engaged" is the richest word in the poem. It can mean in conversation, promised in marriage, meshed like gears, or locked in a fight. The line break leaves it standing alone before "with the night" completes it, so all of these meanings flicker before the sentence settles. Night also takes away the naturalist's main tool, which is sight. What remains is contact and rootedness.
The form supports this. The poem has three stanzas of two, two and three lines. It has no punctuation, no capital letters and no rhyme. Without commas, "but taken prisoner we find" can be read in several ways, which keeps the grammar loose and slightly dreamlike. The rhythm is that of quiet speech, with short lines and an uneven beat that never settles into a metre. The sound patterns are subtle but real. The long "e" of "we", "green" and "retreat" gives the middle stanza a soft, sighing quality. The hard "g" of "green", "ground" and "engaged" links page, earth and tree through sound. The longer final stanza feels like a slow widening of view, from a small human "we" to the open image of oaks in darkness.
Perhaps what makes the poem worth reading is how much it does in so few words. It refuses to treat nature as scenery or as a subject to be studied from a safe distance. By the end, the human "we" has disappeared from the grammar, replaced by the oaks. That suggests the real conversion is the speakers becoming part of what they came to watch. In the poem's logic, reading a landscape and being held by it turn out to be the same act.