The Last Ditch by Austin Clarke

“ Was it an engineer
Busy over a plan
To bring the city nearer,
Who tore up aquatic plants
with fountain pen, would not let
Inches of rivulet run
Where Spring had set a sil
Of flowerets? I could name
Among those little neighbours
Of mine only a few
Of what our County Council
Considers to be refuse;
Mare’s tail that must have pined
A million years to be pine
Or spruce, young reed and flag
That helped me when spirit flagged.
Duckweed, sagittaria,
Might have spread there by road-tar.
They would have been known to Wordsworth
But what are my words worth now ?
I jingle while men pipe down
Delight and look at the mist in
The southwest, think of the missing.
Beyond the pneumatic drill,
Small things uncurl a damp tendril,
Up there at Piperstown.”


Why do I like this poem? 

Clarke’s sense of Nature, compared to Wordsworth’s grand intimations of Nature, had been diminished by “Progress”.  Clarke experienced a world that wasn’t  Wordsworth’s rustic universe any longer.

There was however the immediate freshness of intimate growing things, neighbors, at the edges - where we renew our vital perceptions.