I realized after I already wrote my post for yesterday that it was Earth Day. So in honor of the earth and saving it in fairly good condition for our descendants, here are two of my favorite poems* (yes, I’m an English teacher; what did you expect?).
God’s Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs–
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and ah! bright wings.
–Gerard Manley Hopkins
I love Hopkins’ poetry because of his enthusiastic love of beauty and nature. Often when I drive past some particularly ugly piece of metropolis and see the grass growing up through cracks in the concrete, the line “But for all this, nature is never spent” goes through my head and I think how nice it would be if we all went somewhere else and let the earth renew itself. It would, in a very short time, you know. And if we could come back and do it again more wisely this time…And here’s the other poem I think of when I think of all the humans leaving.
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
–Sara Teasdale
It reminds me of the movie “Day After Tomorrow“. I watched it in Bangkok, a very crowded and very dirty city, especially to someone raised in the country. It was not very nice of me, but in the last scene where it showed the people walking away across miles of frozen New York Harbor, I couldn’t help but wish it would happen to all the large cities of the world. BKK wouldn’t stand a chance, I know, which is why it’s not nice of me, but the last line still echoes in my mind: “I had never seen the air so clear”. It really is shameful that we have so much technology and knowledge and can’t figure out how to use it to save the only earth we know.
Happy Belated Earth Day…and may all your days be Earth Days!
*and just think — by using others’ poems, I’m reusing and recycling! 😀
Ramblings of a Ragamuffin Child 