Report to Wordsworth
You should be here, Nature has need of you.
She has been laid waste. Smothered by the smog, the flowers are mute, and the birds are few in a sky slowing like a dying clock.
All hopes of Proteus rising from the sea have sunk; he is entombed in the waste we dump. Triton’s notes struggle to be free, his famous horns are choked, his eyes are dazed, and Neptune lies helpless as beached as a whale, while insatiate man moves in for the kill.
Poetry and piety have begun to fail,
As Nature’s mighty heart is lying still.
O see the widening in the sky,
God is labouring to utter his last cry.
Wordsworth: the English nature-poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Proteus: Greek mythology, a sea-god that used shells as wind instruments
Neptune: the Roman god of the sea
Insatiate: never satisfied
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‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ by George Gordon, Lord Byron →
36 Responses to ‘Report To Wordsworth’ by Boey Kim Cheng 1. ------------------------------------------------- coreachick says:
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February 20, 2011 at 10:28 am
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Boey Kim Cheng was born in Singapore in 1965. He now lives and works in Australia. This poem has echoes of several sonnets by Wordsworth. As the references are not merely cosmetic, but have real relevance to the themes of the poem, they need to be referred to as background.
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Three in particular are referred to in the next section. Students must read these three poems before the class lesson:
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They are the sonnets ‘London 1802’ (http://tinyurl.com/23gqfpw);
‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ (http://tinyurl.com/2886c4) and most important of all, ‘The world is too much with us . . .’ (http://tinyurl.com/3yoe9em).
She has been laid waste. Smothered by the smog, the flowers are mute, and the birds are few in a sky slowing like a dying clock.
All hopes of Proteus rising from the sea have sunk; he is entombed in the waste we dump. Triton’s notes struggle to be free, his famous horns are choked, his eyes are dazed, and Neptune lies helpless as beached as a whale, while insatiate man moves in for the kill.
Poetry and piety have begun to fail,
As Nature’s mighty heart is lying still.
O see the widening in the sky,
God is labouring to utter his last cry.
Wordsworth: the English nature-poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Proteus: Greek mythology, a sea-god that used shells as wind instruments
Neptune: the Roman god of the sea
Insatiate: never satisfied
* Email * Facebook * * StumbleUpon * Digg * * Print * Reddit * * Twitter *
‘So, We’ll Go No More A-Roving’ by George Gordon, Lord Byron →
36 Responses to ‘Report To Wordsworth’ by Boey Kim Cheng 1. ------------------------------------------------- coreachick says:
-------------------------------------------------
February 20, 2011 at 10:28 am
-------------------------------------------------
Boey Kim Cheng was born in Singapore in 1965. He now lives and works in Australia. This poem has echoes of several sonnets by Wordsworth. As the references are not merely cosmetic, but have real relevance to the themes of the poem, they need to be referred to as background.
-------------------------------------------------
Three in particular are referred to in the next section. Students must read these three poems before the class lesson:
-------------------------------------------------
They are the sonnets ‘London 1802’ (http://tinyurl.com/23gqfpw);
‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’ (http://tinyurl.com/2886c4) and most important of all, ‘The world is too much with us . . .’ (http://tinyurl.com/3yoe9em).