Poems for the early Anthropocene?

Since at least mid-2016, I’ve been finding it more and more difficult to make sense of almost anything, and I became increasingly sure the issue didn’t lie exclusively with me. Poems, classics such as Yeats’ The Second Coming and Wordsworth’s The World Is Too Much With Us, seemed to suit our current times too well.

One perspective that recurs in response to the increased dissension in our interrelations is that we don’t listen to or respond civilly to those whose perspective is moderately to radically different than ours. We’ve become entirely too tribal in much of Western “civilization." (There are those who assert the continuing problems in places like Afghanistan are attributable to cultures dominated by tribalism and warlords.)

Earthrise, Planet B         credit: NASA

Questions I suspect many of US struggle with run something like “Why would we want to listen to anyone who’s so obviously wrong? Why can’t they be reasonable and do it our way?” My answer to such questions is to suggest the questioners go watch West Side Story. Remember the Sharks and the Jets? How about the lyrics:

When you're a Jet
You're a Jet all the way
From your first cigarette
To your last dyin' day

When you're a Jet
If the spit hits the fan
You got brothers around
You're a family man!

You're never alone
You're never disconnected!
You're home with your own:
When company's expected
You're well protected!

Not much room for compromise or accommodation when you’re a Jet, is there? Of course, before the internecine warfare on New York’s Upper West Side, and today’s Middle East conflicts, there was Verona and the Montague and Capulet families, households of sworn enemies, encapsulated by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet.

Issues like our climate crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic make it abundantly clear, more and more each year, that our Earth is getting increasingly crowded. There are not currently sufficient developable resources available to support the world’s population at the living standards of those of US in the  “developed economies.” Our ecological footprints need to be made more equitable and brough into better balance with global resources. That can be accomplished peacefully or not. If it’s not accomplished at all, we will be  faced with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s worst case scenario. That’s what our descendants, and, possibly, US if we live long enough, are faced with unless we redevelop a degree of civility wherein we can at least talk to each other. But, as the climate change activists tell US, “we don’t have time.”

According to yet another classic poem, the specific issues we’re facing may be different, but one way to face them was identified around a century and a half ago. The proponent of a “stiff upper lip” has since been judged by many to be politically incorrect to a significant degree. Nevertheless, incorporation of the approach described below seems to offer a valid early step in a journey toward civility that we all sorely need to undertake. And yet, I do indeed have the temerity to suggest an improvement to this classic poem by a Nobel laureate. In the last line, I would insert two syllables and delete three others, so it reads:

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man Human, my child son!

Could it be that the human race is but one large tribe, inhabiting one home planet, with more in common than not? Perhaps, with edits such as above, we could be... 

 

If—

By Rudyard Kipling

     (‘Brother Square-Toes’—Rewards and Fairies)

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

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