'The poem after forests'

Abstract

This ecocritical poem examines selected romantic ropes of water in European modern poetries, re-presenting these in a context of global water security and with a view to interrogating the limitations of the pastoral poem. While its premise is intertextual, I show that time can be disturbed in the writing of the pastoral scen to draw attention to idealisations of water as a resource and as a romantic trope of plenitude. The poem plays with tense ('Water is/water was') to position the reader in a confronting space whereby the pastoral sanctity of lakes, rivers and streams are forcibly grafted to tropes of toxic discourse and environmental despoliation.