Mark Scrivener Poetry Blog No 9 To A Vanished Globe

TO A VANISHED GLOBE

This poem is in the form of an ode in the ten line iambic pentameter form of the Keat's odes. It is addressed to an object- in this case a small copy of some "old world" globe. A slightly different version of this was originally published in the short-lived Bulletin Supplement many years ago. Small pedantic note- I have chosen the -ize form (as opposed to the -ise form) for realize and epitomize as the ize form is permissible in British English and is regarded as the only correct form in American English and, after all, it is a voiced "s" i.e. "z". I think the theme of the poem can speak for itself- intellect without imagination is "dead". 

TO A VANISHED GLOBE

From markings many journeys could collect

The little likeness of a learned, old,

World globe stands, in a stillness, on my desk;

From times when hard adventure paid with gold,

Lands green and brown lapped by a yellowed sea,

The whole earth's semblance through the eyes of age,

Here imaged in the early seventeenth century.

Before blind pedantry had made a cage

Of false exactitude and barred precision,

This small and clumsy globe still marked a vision.

Imperfect; some that's froth of fantasy-

Seabeasts that never saw the joyful sun;

Yet each land's drawn with its own imagery,

And seas bear tree-born ships that travelled on

The will of wind and here there's bark canoes

And leaping fish; and there, like some odd flower,

A compass of sharp petals points the views

Of many lands: half-known but well-known now.

For we've no use for pictures such as these,

Our plans are clear to fractions of degrees.

Here giant Africa still carries palms

And grass-made huts and hills with shadowed sides,

And naked warriors with shields and arms;

The brown south pole has beasts with strange, green hides.

Here China's wall's so tall that Everest

Is dwarfed; Arabia's desert has camels still-

New Holland, strangely-shaped, is blessed

With its brown hunter too, spear poised to kill;

And Aztec temples rise from jungle lines,

Which oddly seem composed of firs or pines.

But our world's mapped by globe-encircling spies,

That ray the sites of instruments of death.

If this is all our thoughts epitomize,

Why did we ever bother to draw breath?

Yet though we've murdered our imaginations

And gaze upon the screen through soulless eyes,

Perhaps we can arise to new creations,

Perhaps there's time for us to realize

We're blind behind our calculated bars;

Each seed holds secrets deep as those of stars.