"State of the Planet"

I found Robert Hass' piece of poetry very interesting. It was story-like, talking about this little girl, then a one-sided conversation with Lucretius happens. He's not really talking to him, but rather talking to us, the readers of this poem.

In the beginning, I liked when Hass wrote, "Poetry should be able to comprehend the earth. / To set aside from time to time its natural idioms / Of ardor and revulsion..." (50). I think that Hass is trying to say that when we write poetry about the earth and its beauty, the poem should help us understand more in a clearer way than before. And the last part could mean that we don't always need some fancy language, but the description can be raw from whatever we think, not just being passionate or disgusted by our earth. We can put more into the poems to help others understand our point of view.

Another few lines that caught my attention were this: "It must be a gift of evolution that humans / Can't sustain wonder. We'd never have gotten up / From our knees if we could" (51). And then it describes things that humans have done with nature to create other types of beauty. At first, I thought, "How could not really appreciating 'wonder' be a gift?" It could be more of a curse because we forget so easily, but then again, we can always be reminded of the beauty and wonder around us because it is there (for now). I guess that this could be a gift, like I said before, that we can take the beauty around us, and make something else beautiful, such as earrings and make-up and weapons. So nature can have more than one purpose for beauty. Humans can be creative in that way, trying to remake something already beautiful. But maybe this takes away from the beautiful things that God already created in nature, and we, created by God, think we can do better than the Creator Himself. But this probably isn't the full intention behind the things that humans make to create a "manufactured beauty." And I totally agree though that we "humans / Can't sustain wonder." Nature around us does affect us and move us at times when we slow down and choose to be still in the nature around us. Then we are reminded.

These are the last few lines that caused me to ponder their meaning: "So easy, in imagination, to tell the story backward, / Because the earth needs a dream of restoration-- / She dances and the birds just keep arriving / Thousands of them, immense arctic flocks, her teeming life" (56). I am not sure why "in imagination" it is easy "to tell the story backward" as opposed to telling the story not in imagination. I think when Hass writes "to tell the story backward," he is thinking that we start the "story" from where we are at now, and then rewind to capture everything else and are then reminded of how things were before the destruction of the ozone layer and other things. We can jog our memory, thinking of the past and how things were once good, and we want that back now. Our earth needs "restoration" from the devastation that we humans have caused with our industrious selves. Then the last part could be an example of how our world can be restored. Venus, Roman goddess of love, beauty, fertility and prosperity, could maybe restore the earth and bring "her teeming life." Or, it could just mean that "she," the earth, keeps on spinning, "danc[ing]" and continues teem with life.

I think that overall, Hass has many beautiful descriptions that make the places he mentions come alive even though I have never been there. It allows my mind to create and picture based on Hass' words and imagine the beauty that he describes. He weaves this story of this girl and his conversation with Lucretius smoothly throughout this whole poem. And I think that this brings awareness to us, and reminds us of how we have "quite accidentally" ruined our earth from the time it began and bring to mind the beauty that does still exist in our world today (49).
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