The City Planners and the Planners

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‘The City Planners’ and ‘The Planners’ ‘The City Planners’ and ‘The Planners’ both talk about development in urban areas as if a bad thing. The tone of both poems is sort of similar opposing the same point. Margaret Atwood uses the phrase ‘dry August sunlight’ to describe the atmosphere of the place as being bland and dark. Dry is a negative description of the beautiful sunlight, she doesn’t like the look of the place. Boey Cheng has mutual feelings about the urban areas as the way he says ‘The spaces are griddled’ which means that there is no space and the area is very crowded. Both poets find that nature is also affected. ‘Cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.’ This emphasizes that nature is not free and is trapped by the planners. Of no difference in Boey Kim’s poem, he writes ‘even the sea draws back and the skies surrender’ showing a disturbance in nature by the development of the area. The two poems talk negatively towards the city but in ‘The Planners’ Boey Kim Cheng says in the last stanza ‘Not a single drop to stain the blueprint of our past's tomorrow.’ This means he is also looking forward to the future. He uses the word ‘stain’ as to oppose. So he will not write any poetry opposing the development of our tomorrow. The diction between the two poems is quite different. Boey uses more educational and good words to describe the city, for example ‘useless blocks with dental dexterity’ and ‘they have it all so it will not hurt’. While Atwood uses the negative and right-out, sharp words like ‘what offends us is’ and ‘nothing more abrupt’. In stanza 4 in ‘The City Planners’ Atwood starts talking of the consequences of being greedy and describes the collapse of the city where the houses will start to crack and fall giving way to nature. The poet uses the phrase ‘clay seas’ to describe the large dump of rubble from the leftovers of the
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