Report to Wordsworth by Boey Kim Cheng

“you should be here”

An appeal to Wordsworth, the ‘nature poet’ ; a moral imperative directly addressing us

“Nature has need of you”

Echoes lord Kitchener’s forceful call to action: ‘Your country needs you‘

Nature is a force and needs to be revered

“She has been laid waste”

“Laid waste” means nature has been severely damaged.

It also has been feminized and personified as “she” makes us remember mother Earth which lends emotive weight.

Her violation is rendered starker by the arresting caesura by the blunt declarative.

“Smothered by smog”

Hissing sibilance and muffling “sm” repetition adds to the emotive idea of nature being murdered.

“flowers are mute”

Natures beauty is oppressed, the syntactic parallelism of the adjective “mute” creates an emphatic rhythm to carry a dystopian message about endangered species and beauty silenced.

“slowing like a dying clock”

An alarming concept of this eco time bomb. Nature’s vital rhythm is waning. The end stopped lines adds the idea of finality.

“Proteus rising from the sea”

momentarily gives us a sublime and majestic image of a sea god in its ascendancy

“have sunk; he is entombed in the waste”

The downbeat “u” sound of “sunk” (see it coupled with “dump” in the next line), alongside the punch of the caesura magnifies the overall image.

Such imagery of epic proportions (a tricolon of classical gods - Proteus, Triton and Neptune) enlarges the tragic scale of out planet’s destruction. It is the stuff of a classical tragedy.

“entombed” sounds horribly claustrophobic, we have buried a god alive.

“we dump”

our culpability is forcefully foregrounded after the enjambed line. The guilt of this epic disaster lands at our feet.

“his famous horns are chocked, his eyes are dazed”

See how we are killing the senses, damaging sight and sound. “Choked” echoes “smothered” and reinforces the idea of a distressing murder of a god gasping for air.

“Dazed” often goes with confused, even a god is bewildered - overwhelmed.

“Neptune lies helpless as a beached whale”

The simile brings to mind a stock image of an eco disaster. It conveys the shocking idea of something of such size and power is so helpless and defeated

“while insatiate man moves in for the kill”

Chilling idea of mankind as unstoppably destructive ; nothing will satisfy our consumption and ruination of nature.

Conveys the ruthless strategy of calculating predators.

“poetry and piety”

This plosive phrasing creates a focused concept: these powerhouses, culture and religion are dwindling. Man’s appreciation for beauty - our reverence for the sanctity of nature is diminishing.

“Nature’s mighty heart lying”

“Natures mighty heart”, natures cardiac arrest conveys death on an epic scale, “lying” again brings out the physical idea of death.

“O see”

With this apostrophe, Kim Cheng strikes an urgent appeal, a tone of lament

“the wound widening in the sky”

A ghastly image of substantial damage and injury.

See how the open vowels of “o” and “i” and the alliterative “w” creates the sounds of aghast astonishment.

Perhaps referring to the ozone layer (cfcs in the 80s destroying this protective layer)

“God is laboring to utter its last cry”

From the pagan Gods to even the almighty God. The struggle and strain of God which is a shocking image. “Last” dramatically signals the imminent death of God. We are beyond help, beyond divine intervention.

It is a shocking sobering idea that man has “killed a god”

Overall structure of the poem

A Shakespearean sonnet (see its signature finish with a rhyming couplet which lends, here, a sombre tone of finality. The sonnet was traditionally was a form of love poetry; here it shows Kim Cheng’s homage to nature.

However, the irregular lurching pace (with its enjambed lines, end stropped lines and caesuras) may reflect the struggling, strangulated Gods?