Please use the time that you would otherwise devote to writing for English Lit class MEMORIZING the following two poems. All students are to have MEMORIZED these two poems by Monday, February 8. (Don't worry, they are both sonnets, so are short with regular meter and rhyme that will help you!)
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"Report to Wordsworth"
Boey Kim Cheng
You should be here, Nature has need of you.
She has been laid waste. Smothered by the smog,
the flowers are mute, and the birds are few
in a sky slowing like a dying clock.
All hopes of Proteus rising from the sea
have sunk; he is entombed in the waste
we dump. Triton’s notes struggle to be free,
his famous horns are choked, his eyes are dazed,
and Neptune lies helpless as a beached whale,
while insatiate man moves in for the kill.
Poetry and piety have begun to fail,
As Nature’s mighty heart is lying still.
O see the wound widening in the sky,
God is labouring to utter his last cry.
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John Keats
The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's--he takes the lead
In summer luxury,--he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.
