Relationship Between Humans and the Environment
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Good morning Miss Bradley and members of the conference, Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to address you today. I hope that my analysis of the poems In the Tube, the summer and the poster 127 hours will provide insight into the complex relationship between man and nature.
The relationship between man and nature can be inextricably linked to negativity, complication and difficulty. One view of the relationship between man and nature is communicated through the Richard Aldington poem In the Tube. The poem expresses the indifference of commuters to their surroundings and their ever expanding urban environment. Aldington portrays a hostile context in which there appears to be no space for human interaction or expression. The relationship between humans and their environment in Aldingtons poem is conveyed through the negative representation of the urban environment, in stanza 2 the contrast between the “immobility” of humans and the “constant changing” urban environment is emphasising how the expanding urban environment represses those who live within it, humans. Similarly the Personification “swaying trains” is used to establish this contrast, personifying the trains emphasises how urbanity can move and develop, while humans will never truly be moving and developing on the same level with their environment. The negative Connotations of “hard” and “disgust” represents the lurid and disengaged atmosphere of urbanity, these connotations communicate the unwelcoming, negative nature of the urban environment and its unworthiness of being inhabited by man, reflecting the complex way that humans interact with their environment. The motif of Human eyes is consistently repeated to represent the immobility of humanity “a row of eyes, eyes of greed”. It depicts the mechanisation of the urban environment and the people within it; we perceive this through the synecdoche, “gaze, stare at one point, at my eyes”. where the eyes are a representation of all human emotion, with humans being discontent with their surroundings. Humans are depicted as lacking control with instability, the rhetorical question “what right have you to live?” dehumanises people as the irony of our own creations cause us to be at the mercy of what they provide, this is reflected in the fact that the creations that we create are invented to be for our benefit not our detriment.
Conversely, Josh Pykes The Summer, depicts a more balanced coexistence of man and the natural environment. Pyke uses a nostalgic tone to stress the yearning for youth, which is intrinsically tied to our memories of summer, and the protagonists desire to return to the youth that summer represents. The simile, “time is like the ocean” communicates the constant movement of time and the protagonists separation from youth. The motif