Nichole McGee
17 March 2019
The Past of the Climate
The topic that I pulled from the discourse was the idea of climate change. Although climate change was relatively new both poems discussed its effects on the world. I looked into both Bishop and Blake writings. From their writings, I can see how both Blake and Bishop predicted the future of climate change. In reviewing both Blake’s work, “Auguries of Innocence” and Bishop’s the Sandpiper, I was able to conclude how both authors were able to articulate climate change although it was not developed as a term yet.
From looking at Bishop’s writing first, I saw many descriptions that concluded to the effects of climate change. In the poem, there’s a line that states “The roaring alongside he takes for granted,and that every so often the world is bound to shake”. I think that this describes an earthquake. Bishop is saying that the man notices the earthquake but sees it as something that is is just part of nature. He does not see it as something that is out of the ordinary. Therefore, just as many do today, he was taking for granted the negative surroundings of climate change as just an earthquake but that could obviously be on the bricks for something bigger. The world was living him clues that it was in danger, and he ignored those clues.
In the poem by Blake, he states that a dog starved at his Masters Gate predicts the ruin of the State. I think this goes to the world hunger epidemic. This is a direct effect of the climate change. This is because as the weather changes excruciatingly, crops began to fail and water begin to dry up. People can not eat. The saying “predicts the ruin of the state” means that starvation is the tell tell sign that something bad is bound to happen. Therefore, without even knowing what to call the future sinister disasters, Blake was speaking of the effects of climate change in his poem “Auguries of Innocence”.
Both poems were different in nature. However, they all spoke about similar things. These things were the negative effects of climate change. In the poem by Bishop, earthquakes were mentioned. In the poem by Blake, he spoke of world hunger. Both of these are the disasters of climate change. The most profound aspect from this is that climate change was not as spoke about or even a thing at that time as it is in modern times. Therefore, both poets were ahead of their time. Now in modern times, we can look back at the poems in their contents and see how they were impacted by climate change and how people turned their head to it. Hopefully, reading poems such as these would help to ignite a fire under people of today to help make a change before the world becomes progressively worse as climate change continues to shake the world as it did back in the days of Elizabeth Bishop and William Blake.