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Question
Write a summary of the poem.
- Title
- Introductory paragraph (about the poem, type, nature, tone)
- Main body (central idea, the gist of the poem)
- Conclusion (opinion, views, appeal).
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Solution
The Planners
The title of the poem is 'The Planners' and it focuses on the planners' need for perfection and uniformity, which leads to the loss of history as well as nature.
The poem is a satire as it mocks the planners' desire to build a flawless world. The poet has written this poem in a free-verse format as he strongly opposes structural uniformity. The tone of the poet throughout the poem is sarcastic, except for the last stanza where it changes to melancholic. The poet's reference to the city's structures as rigid mathematical designs and his comparison of the planners to dentists convey his sarcastic tone with great clarity.
The poet expresses how his country, the island-state of Singapore, is being torn down by the planners for building perfectly measured and confined structures that erase Singapore's history and push nature away from its landscape. The planners destroy the ancient structures that form a part of Singapore's past by terming them as 'flawed' and 'useless'. The poet stresses how the skyscrapers built by the planners resemble perfect rows of teeth, which symbolize artificiality, just like a dentist straightens crooked teeth to create the perfect smile. Though aesthetically appealing, the smile is not real. Similarly, Singapore's scene has also lost its originality. The planners want to reinvent history and therefore recklessly drill to build sky-high structures without being sensitive to the country's heritage. At the end of the poem, in a state of acceptance, the poet declares that he shall not stain with his poetry, the immaculate world that the planners have built. This is ironic because the poet is writing the poetry while declaring that he won't write one.
The poem's appeal lies in its unique stance on the destruction caused by modernisation, as it emphasizes the consequences of urbanisation on history, as opposed to just nature. In my opinion, this makes the poem stand out from the others that talk about the ill-effects of building a concrete jungle.
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