Poems about summer have the ability to make you feel the hazy heat, the sand between your toes, the smell of the chlorine in the city pool, and the strip of sunburn across your racer back tank like no other manner of writing can.Īnd let's face it: In summertime you have no time to waste. In Greek mythology, Phaethon was the young boy, the son of Helios, who drove the sun across the sky every morning in a chariot the sun, Griswold suggests, has got out of control and is burning up the planet.Ever since even before William Shakespeare's famous "shall I compare thee to a summer's day" everyone's (well, should be everyone's) favorite season has gone together with poetry like peanut butter and jelly. With an echo of Geoffrey Hill’s poem about Ovid in the Third Reich, Griswold, an American poet born in 1973, offers a short poem about climate change, summoning the rising temperatures of equatorial and sub-Saharan Africa (Griswold, too, mentions Ethiopia). Eliza Griswold, ‘ Ovid on Climate Change’. There is even something elegiac about it, even though McHugh’s poem is not a formal elegy.ġ1. The poet calls upon humankind to capture and document everything before it all disappears for good – it’s a poem about climate change and the idea of the ‘last chance’ to see certain species and societies (‘the boy in Addis Ababa who feeds / the starving dog’ calling to mind the much-documented famines of Ethiopia).Įverything is fascinating – nothing fails to astonish the speaker, whether beautiful or ugly. Plath’s work is often ecologically aware – see also her poem about nuclear holocaust, ‘Waking in Winter’ – but ‘Elm’ succeeds in linking this ecopoetics with her more personal or ‘confessional’ style.Īs the poem’s title makes clear, this is a contemporary poem about recording the world by videoing it on a computer. There’s a suggestion here of pollution and acid rain, foreshadowing the poem’s later referencing to ‘snaky acids’ that ‘hiss’. Then comes the life-giving and renewing rain, but the fruit that it inspires the elm to bring forth is ‘tin-white, like arsenic’ (poison again). In this late Plath poem, the elm tree speaks to us, saying it can bring to us the ‘sound of poisons’. The elm tree is a tree associated with rebirth. Merwin (1927-2019) here addresses the ‘gray whale’ as it heads towards extinction, condemning mankind for its thoughtlessness and self-importance in letting so much of the natural world become endangered through its own selfish acts. Ammons (1926-2001) meditates on our own place in the broader environment and natural landscape, by thinking about the algae and tiny sea-creatures we share it with.Ĩ.
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You can listen to Larkin reading his poem here. Soon, Larkin says, he fears that England will be nothing but ‘concrete and tyres’. Written in the 1970s about a vanishing idea of a romanticised England –with its ‘guildhalls’ and ‘carved choirs’ – ‘Going, Going’ laments the auctioning off of the English countryside to the highest bidder, with its title summoning, without quite being able to complete, the auctioneer’s cry: ‘Going, going, gone’.