That country park visitors see beauty in a manageable sense:
Now beauty resides in extensions of idleness, in somewhere
Waiting to be discovered, photographed, evaluated by questionnaire,
Confirmed by projects for pleasing viewpoints and vistas
And bird hides whose appeal can directly be tested by listers;
Now she views birds and flowers impersonally as ticks,
Their habitats as schedules and bibliography, their occurrence as statistics -
And what emerges from the peopled and visionary forest are case-histories,
Maps and plans, with an appended psychological treatise -
(with great satisfaction)
All typed with the help of yours truly! But the age exacts
Megabytes of memory, not recollection in tranquillity, facts
Not values - if she’d tendered a poem she’d have shirked her duty -
And because of hunger her thesis was well done. Now beauty
Made her Country Park manager, seeing how she’d built him
Bone by bone and could grasp complexity, the paradigm
Of all good policy. This question I ask of you:
Which voice of nature - the inner or the outer - spoke true?
WANDERER
Your theatrical asides seem operatic - but your aesthetics are forced,
For are we to believe, in the prelude, that the soul can exhaust
Her gold mine of truth? For your scene leads away from the elemental
To the repetitive tapping of keys, a phrasing instrumental
To a cadenza that suggests that beauty’s only outward-seeming
And truth the longing to master complexity. Yet the esteeming
Of systems analysis above subliminal references to beauty
And truth (the modern way) is foredoomed by the duty
Of finding solutions, when no one has asked the question
‘Which voice of nature spoke true?’ In the context of the congestion