"they build and will not stop
even the sea draws back
and the skies surrender"
Natural resources are paying the costs of the expanding cities. But nature is not the only one paying for the consequences of the behaviors of planners, history as a whole is also being destroyed: “They erase the flaws”. The planners have decided that what has been achieved in the past is not appropriate and to some extents not perfect enough. He also compares the planning as mathematics with some kind of irony. He introduces an enumeration where he describes a narcotic effect of the planning: “Anaesthesia, amnesia, hypnosis”. The poet finishes his poem saying that he will not be pessimistic because he will not stain the present. “But my heart would not bleed poetry. Not a single drop to stain the blueprint of our past’s tomorrow”.
In the poem “The City Planners”, I can find more irony than in the previous poem. She describes a boring and colorless situation in the city because is Sunday, and streets are empty. She uses personifications and visual images to show the structure of the city: “the houses in pedantic rows, the planted sanitary trees…”
Throughout the whole poem she makes references of human intervention in nature like in this quotation: “nothing more abrupt than the rational whine of a power mower cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.” There are also many characteristics of the crazy urbanization.
She describes an obsession of perfection, where you cannot admire the beauty of nature. She mentions a kind of madness and hysteria referring to the urbanization because all is structured like humans need or want.
After analyzing both poems I can conclude that these poems are very similar, but I can find some differences between them. The ideas and images that poets refer to, are similar, but also there is a main theme in common that is the discomfort of the urbanization. The difference between these two is that Atwood believes that nature will strike again and destroy everything that human planning had created, while Cheng insists on the opposite: nature may not come back because of the continuous growing up and out of cities. Both poets make their poems very effective because it make readers understand how this “crazy” urbanization is erasing nature and its possible flaws. Really, I don’t think nature may have any flaws. On the contrary: the urbanization is the one how may have them.
