Vanilde, I can’t figure out how your page is working so I’m commenting here.
In stanza 1, what does Avison say about decided that too many live?
In stanza 2, what does it mean to say the Presence ‘stings us alive’?
In stanza 3, what seashores and territories are these? What does the use of the modal ‘may’ show?
In stanza 4, why is it costly to know others?
in stanza 5, how does the Presence counter quantity?
To Counter Malthus, by Margaret Avison
This poem, To Counter Malthus, Margaret Avison wrote it to criticize the Malthus‘ idea that population, when increased in a geometrical ratio and subsistence for man increased in an arithmetical ratio. He wanted to say that the growth of population would be limited by the food supply. The increase of the population would bring a great misery and penury and many people would die of famine.
According Malthus, the population would avoid this disaster, principally the poor. They would get marriage with strict sexual abstinence before marriage, else could commit abortion and infanticide, preventively to regulate the number of people in the world.
Malthus was a pessimistic English economist and social scientist but was famous at to become known the ideas of him then he published the two main works that he wrote: Principles of Political Economy and Definitions in Political Economy.
This poem,The Counter Malthus, is not concerned with the population’s social economic conditions like Thomas Malthus is, but shows the optimism and the solidarity among the people. The world is great and there is place enough for so many people that do to each other the things that they need.
The hunger is a threat but Malthus doesn’t suppose that the technology and the advancement made in agricultural science allowed farmers to make greater using of their lands and to produce food in a big abundance to guarantee the life to everybody. If someone doesn’t have food it’s because of the wrong distribuition of wealth among the population.
Margaret Avison use a lively but energetic language to counter Malthus and talk that the presence get make safe the people in the churn of the Quantity.
Attention:
You can listen the Margaret avison’s voice declaiming the poem: Rising Dust in the site: http://www.griffinpoetryprize.com/shortlist_2003.ph
Rising Dust
The physiologist says I am well over
half water.
I feel, look, solid; am
though leaky firm.
Yet I am composed
largely of water.
How the composer turned us out
this way, even the learned few do not
explain. That’s life.
And we’re in need of
more water, over and over, repeatedly
thirsty, and unclean.
The body of this earth
has water under it and
over, from
where the long winds sough
tirelessly over water, or shriek around
curved distances of ice.
Sky and earth invisibly
breathe skyfuls of
water, visible when it
finds its own level.
Even in me?
Kin to waterfalls
and glacial lakes and sloughs
and all that flows and surges,
yet I go steadily,
or without distillation climb at will
(until a dissolution
nobody anticipates).
I’m something else besides.
The biochemist does not
concern himself with this.
It too seems substance,
A vital bond threaded on an
as-if loom out there.
The strand within
thrums and shudders and twists.
It cleaves to this
colour or texture and
singles out to a rhythm
almost its own, again,
anticipating design.
But never any of us
physiologist or fisherman
or I
quite makes sense of it. We
find our own level
as prairie, auburn or
snow-streaming, sounds forever
the almost limitless.
From Concrete and Wild Carrot, by Margaret Avison
R.S.Thomas was a welsh poet identifyed with the Welsh culture and he was member of a monastic order, so he wrote this poem showing about the memories of the past, but he have hope yet that in the future God will correct all wrong things what happened with them.
In the begining of poem the poetry remember not very clear of men working in old rectories, priests perhaps. They are together in the same grave, covered by dusty and fungi. They represent the past of Welsh people that can desapear domenate by modern cultures. This poem is almost all of Thomas’ work, it talk about two passions, the Welsh people and the Welsh landscape showed under his religious views.
The Country Clergy
I see them working in old rectories
By the sun’s light, by candle-light,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes: rather they wrote
On men’s hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.
R. S. THOMAS (March, 1958)
In the past
The Welsh were a power people and he was a favorit subjct to R.S. Thomas to write his poems. The R.S. Thomas’s poems. He was a clergyman, so he has a regilious views that is present in his works.
The Welsh wave red for war, but they was defeated by enemy of tem.
Whe Welsh people ran away and not found a segurety place. The king of them was betrayed and was died.
In the present the Welsh didnt’t forget the past the live grabled in the past and in the history and in the proud of them. They was not able to defends themself and now have only the crumbs of them life of the past.
*Uau!… I’m sorry. I wanted to say: attached, i.e, fix one thing in another thing. In this case, the Welsh are living in present, but they are still remember of the past.
In the end of this poem shows that the Welsh people have a hope of to arise again and to live a different history and they not will leave the future of them desapear. This poem is a good presentation of the Welsh history and of the its people.
Welsh History
We were a people taut for war; the hills
Were no harder, the thin grass
Clothed them more warmly than the coarse
Shirts our small bones.
We fought, and were always in retreat,
Like snow thawing upon the slopes
Of Mynydd Mawr; and yet the stranger
Never found our ultimate stand
In the thick woods, declaiming verse
To the sharp prompting of the harp.
Our kings died, or they were slain
By the old treachery at the ford.
Our bards perished, driven from the halls
Of nobles by the thorn and bramble.
We were a people bred on legends,
Warming our hands at the red past.
The great were ashamed of our loose rags
Clinging stubbornly to the proud tree
Of blood and birth, our lean bellies
And mud houses were a proof
Of our ineptitude for life.
We were a people wasting ourselves
In fruitless battles for our masters,
In lands to which we had no claim,
With men for whom we felt no hatred.
We were a people, and are so yet.
When we have finished quarrelling for crumbs
Under the table, or gnawing the bones
Of a dead culture, we will arise
And greet each other in a new dawn
Armed, but not in the old way.
R. S. Thomas (1913 – 2000)
