Standardisation (A.D. Hope)

 

Standardisation

-A. D. Hope

When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;

When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the "Standardisation of the Race";

I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.

For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings.

She does not tire of the pattern of a rose.
Her oldest tricks still catch us with surprise.
She cannot recall how long ago she chose
The streamlined hulls of fish, the snail's long eyes,

Love, which still pours into its ancient mould
The lashing seed that grows to a man again,
From whom by the same processes unfold
Unending generations of living men.

She has standardised his ultimate needs and pains.
Lost tribes in a lost language mutter in
His dreams: his science is tethered to their brains,
His guilt merely repeats Original Sin.

And beauty standing motionless before
Her mirror sees behind her, mile on mile,
A long queue in an unknown corridor,
Anonymous faces plastered with her smile.

 

Essay:

About the Author:

A. D. Hope was born in Cooma, New South Wales and educated partly at home and in Tasmania. He attended Fort Street Boys High School, Sydney University and then the University of Oxford on scholarship. Returning to Australia in 19131, he then trained as a teacher. He was a lecturer at the University of Melbourne from 1945 to 1950 and in 1951 he took up the position as the first professor of English at the newly founded Canberra University College, later it became Australian National University (ANU). When the two institutions merged, a Chari he held until retiring in 1968. He received many awards for his poetry. He died in Canberra having suffered dementia in his last years, and was buried at the Queanbeyan Lawn cemetery.

 

Introduction:

In “Standardisation”, A.D. Hope thinks about the modern age and realizes that nothing has perfect standard in in as everything is man-made. But “Nature” has the perfectness in it, in creating things. The poet glorifies the perfectness shown by Nature, saying that for millions of years the formula of creating things is not at all altered by Nature. This is the secret of Nature where men fail.

 

Modern Man’s loss of Individuality: This poem critiques the excessive standardization and industrialization of modern society, contrasting it with the organic, natural world represented by Earth. The speaker challenges the complaints of journalists, aesthetes, and nature poets who lament the loss of individuality and authenticity. Instead, the speaker argues that Earth has always been a master of mass production, creating countless variations of forms and living beings throughout history. The poem implies that human attempts to create artificial, standardized experiences pale in comparison to the vast and diverse beauty of the natural world. It also suggests the interconnectedness of all living things through shared needs, dreams, and guilt.

 

Poets’ Superstition: The poet writes that the theosophist living in the modern brick-house using vacuum cleaner and tinned food says that man must live close with Nature in order to reach the Soul of God. Yet another Nature poet who wants to take another birth in a town which is not made of synthetic stone, i.e. artificial materials or do not find any motor cars or do not find any ‘celluloid and rubber’ material emerges from his “Sunday School” in which the hymns and prayers are chanted. He informs in his sentimental phrase drools out about the “standardisation of race.” According to A.D. Hope these poets forget that Nature has perfection in it to create thousands of butterflies millions of years without any mistake.

 

A.D. Hope’s Wild Imagination: Seeing the havoc done by modern man to Nature the poet wildly imagines that the ripen-fruit falling from tree due to the wind-blow to that of the old ‘ham’, the old actor who dies and goes to grave due to his old age. Both are natural. But the poet thinks that the atrocity done by modern men make the fruit go to its grave earlier even before it fully gets ripen.

 

Modern Man Vs Nature:

A.D. Hope compares the modern man and Nature to glorify the flawless power of Nature. Hope says that no manufacturer can compete with Nature producing faultless products, because Nature is producing so things, both flora and fauna for millions of years without any flaw and that itself without getting tiredness. But man soon becomes tired producing the same things. The poet gets  surprised seeing the pattern of roses, streamlined body of the fish,  the eyes on the antenna of the snails, ‘love’ the most important emotion of all-living, especially human beings. He also wonders at how Nature had learnt to do the correct shapes with perfectness, without changing the patterns for millions of years. Above all the poet wonders at the power of Nature who has put not only the emotions but also the brain in man’s body to see and learn from her. But after learning from her, man thinks that it is only he who discovered things which is a sin man caused against Nature. This sin resembles the “Original Sin” that Adam and Eve committed against God. Yet Nature is benign to men as she feels happy seeing the human world which carries her own resemblance.

 

Conclusion:

Thus, in this poem, A.D. Hope glorifies the power of Nature which has the capacity to produce things millions of years without any change in pattern against the modern men who produce things with the help of machines. However, Nature has perfectness but men lack such perfectness producing things, yet boast themselves as scientists who invented such and such things. They, according to the poet, forget that they have taken everything from Nature and boasting themselves, they commit sin to Nature.