In ‘How to Leave the World that Worships Should,’ how does the poet present ideas about the way we live and work in the modern world?

The response below was done with about 10 minutes thinking and planning time and about 20 minutes writing time. Reading it back, clearly there are other things I could have said about this poem, but in an exam situation, you have to prioritise! This comes with the usual instructions to not use for homework, or in any other way to plagiarise, but to help you to think and write about poetry. The poem is below.

Barber’s poem presents the modern world as hectic and hurried and she suggests that the reader should opt out of the busyness and take a moment's pause in nature.

Barber has written a sonnet, however, in her version, it is not romantic love that she extols, but self care or mindfulness. The octet concerns itself with explaining the busy nature of modern life where communications can get to us at anytime. There is a strong turn at the beginning of the sestet as ‘above the sky unrolls its telegram,’ the softer assonant sounds of ‘above’ and ‘unrolls’ slow the pace of the poem and her image of the sky as ‘unrolled’ is much gentler than the ‘panic’ and ‘fireworks’ of the octet. As is traditional, her sonnet uses iambic pentameter, but the rhyme scheme only resolves into an orderly traditional pattern in the sestet. In the octet there are some rhymes: ‘sheep’ and ‘sleep,’ but generally the line endings’ sounds are chaotically organised, like the busy panicked content of the poem.

The poem addresses itself directly to the reader in the second person with its repeated instructions to ‘let…’ various stressful communications go unanswered. Even though this octet is full of busyness, fireworks and panic it counterbalances these images with suggestions of what life could be like if we allow them to go unanswered. ‘Faxes’ may demand our attention, but we can let them age into ‘butter curls’ on ‘dusty shelves’ and ‘junk mail’ once ignored ‘builds its castles in the hush.’ Throughout the poem these annoying, interrupting communications are personified. By being ignored, they take care of themselves, by turn ‘curling,’ ‘building,’ ‘flying,’ and ‘ringing.’ The speaker is strongly suggesting that if the reader ignores these no disastrous ‘fireworks’ will ‘burst’ but that they will take care of themselves and life will go on. The language changes in the sestet using natural imagery to suggest that being calm and breathing in nature is the right way to be. Even though the sky is described as a ‘telegram’ it is ‘wordless’ and is making no demands on the reader's time. It is ‘simply understood.’ This contrast is encapsulated in two similes: in the octet ‘emails fly like panicked tiny birds,’ strongly suggestive of noise and chaos; whereas in the sestet the reader has made their ‘mark like bird tracks in the sand,’ suggesting calm, peaceful exercise and the softness of sand under foot.

Overall Barber criticises a life that is lived only in responding to work and life's communications. She wants the reader to take a moment to stop and stare at the beauty and wonder of nature.