Genre:

Poetry

Subjects:

Progress, Railways, Industry, Manufactories, Pollution, Disease, Environmentalism

    Assesses the environmental cost of implementing a number of progressive measures in society. For example, 'There are railways, increasing old towns, / Forming new ones round every station; / But they've cut up the fields and the downs, / And disfigured the face of the nation', while 'Manufactures and arts, bearing fruit, / Have extended, but refuse deliver, / With the sewage of towns, to pollute / Every once crystal streamlet and river', and not only 'Black the herbage and blacken the air' with 'foul acrid smoke' but poison the fish in the rivers.