Levertov - This great unknowing : last poems

Mustafa Tolba, Director-General
of the U. N. Environment Program Dear 19th century! Give me refuge in your unconscious sanctuary for a while, let me lose myself behind sententious bombazine, rest in the threadbare brown merino of dowerless girls. Yes, you had your own horrors, your dirt, disease, profound injustices; yet the illusion of endless time to reform, if not themselves, then the world, gave solace even to gloomy minds. Nature, for you, was to be marvelled at, praised and conquered, a handsome heiress; any debate concerned the origin and subsequent behaviour of species, not their demise. Virtue, in your heyday (blessed century, Active but so real!) was confident of its own powers.

Laxly guarded, your Hesperides was an ordinary orchard, its fruit apples of simple hope and happiness. And though the ignorant armies, then as always, clashed by night, there was a beckoning future to look to, that bright Victorian cloud in the eastern sky. The dodo was pathetic, grotesque in its singular extinction, its own stupidity surely to blame. It stood alone on some low hillock of the mind and was not seen as shocking, nor as omen.