All’s Right with the World
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
“Nature … in the very act of labouring as a machine is also sleeping as a picture.” Canon J. B. Mozely, University Lectures, sermon on “Nature”
The paradox is pretty. Nature grinds
Away as scarlet teeth and claws. Charles
Reveals the unforgiving truth. He finds,
Darwinian, that nature, made of snarls
And screams, is mechanistic in its sin,
But nineteenth-century poets and the like
Incline to frame rhymed nature as akin
To “splendor in the grass,” and not the spike
Of fang in lurching antelope. Annie
Ramps Darwin’s horror up. Dillardian
Forensic eyes find that there’s no cranny
In walls not requiring a guardian
Against the gobble of cannibal bite.
Can prettiness exist in such a blight?
Cocoon_of_an_Ichneumoid_wasp_(Campopleginae)_and_the_empty_skin_of_a_caterpillar_it_had_parasitized_(8073727904) By gbohne from Berlin, Germany