“The Improvers” by Colin Thiele is a story about a frustrated man describing the destructive antics of the State Highwaymen. The author paints a vivid picture of what he calls “mechanical mastodons”, tearing up the environment to make way for a new road. The purpose of the poem is to put across the devastating nature of the human species, and how it is hurting our planet. The emotion in the poem anger at the way we behave, and when the reader reads it they feel sad, because of what people are doing, and then the reader feels angry at the same thing. This poem represents nature and the planet by showing how delicate life and the earth is, and turning that into a story about construction.
The poem is structured in such a way that it is a conventional poem, but can’t really be grouped into a category of poems. Each stanza has eight to ten lines, and there isn’t really a structure of sorts, as in syllable matching, it’s more like free verse in that sense. The poet has used a very large vocabulary to put across the message, and the language is effective and describes the idea well. The language has words that are long and roll off your tongue, so it evokes a sense of flow in the poem.
“The Improvers” has quite a few instances of imagery. Similes are when one thing is likened to another. There is a couple of examples of similes, “like an old crone with a bag of melons stuffed under her jumper”, and “charge like bulls”, and they are both in paragraph two. Metaphors are when one thing is said to be another thing. There are a few metaphors; “damnable tamed dinosaurs”, “mechanical mastodons”, and “one fat old waddler”. And personification is when inanimate objects are given human-like characteristics. And so there are many cases of personification, such as “munching the red earth, spilling it, dripping”, “half masticated from the corners of their mouths” and “some like nightmare beetles butt about”. Nature is represented when the machines of mankind are likened to...